


But We Were In Screaming Color

by linzeestyle



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Body Horror, Canon Divergence - Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Canon-Typical Violence, Everyone Needs A Hug, Flashbacks, M/M, Psychic Bond, Red Room, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-07 19:13:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 36,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18879481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linzeestyle/pseuds/linzeestyle
Summary: Steve's world has been black and white since 1945, colors burned out like a funeral pyre.This isn’t supposed to happen.





	1. RED

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in 2015 as a WIP.

The first color Steve sees in seventy years is red.

Tony’s suit, coming at him -- a blur of gold and crimson and the breath has been knocked from Steve’s lungs in a rush. He can see the red of Natasha’s hair, the blue burn of electricity that follows as she jumps onto the back of another assailant: hired goons, an easy shot, except that their guns that shoot bolts of energy, and Steve would say he’s never seen anything like it, but he’ll never be able to close his eyes without the memory. When the next beam hits rubble it’s an electric, glowing blue, and Steve falls to the floor, head pounding. He hears Tony on his intercom, tinny and distorted.

\--Cap! Cap, are you hit? Tash, Rogers is down. We need to get him out of here--

Steve looks up long enough to see Natasha shooting two more hostiles; there are only three left, and Tony takes them out in a beam of light, white and yellow and blinding in color, painful and Steve puts his head between his knees, falls onto the ground and tucks in against the light. He feels a hand on his shoulder and hears Natasha on the intercom, Stark I need you to get him to safety. He’s not hit, there’s something else wrong here. Quieter, close to his ear. “Steve. Can you hear me? Can you tell me what happened?”

He shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut and feeling tears escape from the corners. If he opens them again he’ll be able to see blue in his own uniform, spots of orange fire and the flecked gravel below him. His stomach lurches. It’s all wrong.

His world’s been black and white since 1945, colors burned out like a funeral pyre. This isn’t supposed to happen.

  
*

A quinjet -- sleek, slate black, reflecting hematite sky off its wings like an oil slick -- pulls them out of the debris, carries them back to Stark Tower. Steve lays curled on a gurney the entire way, head on Natasha’s lap and blunt fingers whorling gentle lines across his scalp.

“Do you wanna talk about it,” she says, finally, a bit awkward, but earnest.

Steve waits a long moment, blinking at the gun-metal walls, and turns onto his back to look up at her. “Your hair’s brighter than I expected,” he says, instead. “It looks nice.”

Natasha’s head tips curiously. “You can see color?”

Steve closes his eyes and presses his palms against them. “Started in the middle of the fight. I saw Tony’s suit and I just--choked.” He bites the inside of his mouth hard, trying to replace the empty feeling in his gut with anything else. “I forgot about the headache.”

Natasha looks down at him, her expression gone serious. “You used to-- You saw them before.” She swallows visibly, and Steve knows this is uncomfortable for her, is oddly comforted by the fact she’s pushing through it anyway, still sitting on the cot with him, hand in his hair. He breathes up at the ceiling and takes in the sleek, slick silver of the jet’s interior until he hears Natasha ask, “who were they?”

Steve closes his eyes. “You know. Everyone knows.” Not then, of course. Decades later. It was Steve’s sketchbooks, that gave him away. A set of chalks that Bucky bought him one year, a little

tin of color that he’d used sometimes when they were alone. From fifteen to twenty-six he’d carried color with him, filling sketchbooks with landscapes and portraits and Bucky, always Bucky -- in gold and copper and his eyes, blue and damning.

Natasha frowns, fingers stilling in Steve’s hair. She doesn’t say anything else, though -- not until the quinjet lands, and Steve’s being led to the medbay for a physical. Natasha touches his shoulder as they step onto the tarmac, looking at him from behind dark glasses that give nothing away.

“I’m sorry,” she says softly, and Steve gives her a watery smile, because her hair shines copper in the sun, and because he is, too.

*

Steve spends the next thirty-six hours in medical. A team of SHIELD doctors are brought in to run tests and watch screens; Steve stares at the bed sheets and watches the pattern as it shifts and slides in painful glitches, faded forest green disappearing into black and white, then back again -- then gone.

Natasha comes to see him at 1700 hours, and the first thing he notices is her hair. “Gray again,” he says, by way of greeting.

  
She raises an eyebrow. “Gone?”

“For now. It’s touch and go. Kinda hurts.” They both know that’s an understatement.

Natasha perches at the edge of the bed. “I read your notes. You told your doctor you had a sudden headache and lost time. They want to test you for epilepsy.” She looks disappointed, and he’s impressed by how effective it is. “Why didn’t you tell them?”

“Nothing to tell,” he says, ignoring the knot in his gut. “Besides, can’t seizures trigger chromatism? Seems like they’re looking in the right direction.”

“You know, chromatism is tied to extended exposure to a specific combination of pheromones. There’s no reason to think you couldn’t have just met someone else at some point--”

“Yeah, I’m not having this conversation.” Steve glares at her. Natasha stares back.

  
“Look,” he says, finally, feeling defensive and somehow childish. He knows the idea of soulmates is old-fashioned -- silly when he was a kid, scientifically baseless now -- but the idea of his own body betraying him like that, moving on from Bucky when he never will, makes every part of him tense, makes him wonder if there’s anything left of him but a collection of unclaimed ghosts. He rubs his eyes and at his hair, watching mortar dust fall from his body. “It’s wrong anyway, it keeps coming in and out. Does that sound normal to you?”

Natasha chews the inside of her cheek. “You’d rather it be seizures?”

  
The bite in her voice is gone. The uncertainty left behind is even harder to stomach. Steve doesn’t answer, and reaches for his clothes.  
*

The bombs go off two days later.

The attack is good: precise, clean; almost terrifying in its mechanisms. A timed explosion that takes out the underwater reactor powering Stark Tower and three of Stark Industries’ backup store holds, and Steve is the first one to make it to the monitors, watching inky black water turn blue and red with heat as the generators whirr to life and the power comes back on. Around him, the rest of the monitors flicker to life, revealing Stark’s off-shore buoys: the oil-slick water, rocking with force; the floating shrapnel, singed by flame.

“Holy shit.”

The sound behind Steve is Tony, hands flying over the holographic image of two separate keyboards, glancing at the damage with nothing like surprise. “JARVIS, real talk. How long do we have backup power?”

“Generator one is at 94%, sir. Units two, four and seven are on reserve.”

“What happened to the others?” Tony looks up at empty computer banks, expression grim. Steve backs away, hands fumbling along the cool lines of the workbench, and suspects Tony already knows the answer.

  
“Three, five and eight have been unresponsive for eight minutes. Their feeds are unavailable.” Tony swerves, looking back at the largest of the computers, the feed of the water, still bubbling  
with heat. “Well fuck me sideways.” He looks up. “It’s a coordinated attack. Is the building secure?”

“There are no signs of a breach in the perimeter, sir. Nor have there been any attempts.”

“Not good enough. Get Tasha up here.” Tony rubs at his forehead and turns on his heel, seeming to just now realize he’s not alone in the room. He catches Steve, blinking up at the computers, and spares a lopsided grin that looks tired and sharp, a knife-edge to feral. “You okay there, Cap?”

Steve turns and bends at the waist, holding the edge of the table in front of him and ignoring the way the brushed steel reflects the suddenly-garish blue of his suit. The color hurts, and he closes his eyes.

“Peachy keen,” he grits out.

“Huh.” Tony takes the few steps down from the computers in a single hop, and then he’s standing beside Steve. “You know it gets me tingly when you’re bitchy like that,” he mumbles, like he’s not paying attention to what’s coming out of his mouth. A rough hand grabs Steve’s chin and turns him, and then Tony’s covering one eye, then the other, frowning and leaning back. “Huh,” he repeats.

“What the hell--Tony,” Steve jerks away.

Tony taps his own chest, the arc reactor, glowing blue. The crystalline clink drops his eyes without thinking, and the bright neon has him wincing, looking away just as fast. Tony stares at Steve like a science experiment, even as he grabs a lab coat off the table, puts it on and buttons it over the blinding light. Steve looks back up, stomach still churning, to find Tony assessing him thoughtfully.

“How long?”

Steve stares at him, unblinking. His stomach lurches again, and he clenches the work table hard

enough that he can feel his fingers dig in, leaving prints. He feels ill, surrounded by glowing light, hooked in by the sharp curiosity in Tony’s expression.

To hell with it. These are supposed to be his teammates. He’s supposed to trust them to have his back.

“A week,” Steve says, sagging back against the table, shifting his weight enough to lift a hand, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “It was touch and go for a while. Now it’s just...bright. Hurts like hell.”

“Chromatism.” Tony tips his head. “Gradual onset. That normal for you?”

Steve raises an eyebrow, surprised -- but then, he isn’t sure why he should be. Tony is his father’s son, and Howard was the first to notice, him and Bucky. Snipers saw in color, he’d told Steve. No other reason anyone would be fool enough to do what Steve did, in Azzano. Or dumb enough to follow Steve right back into a war zone.

He doesn’t bother saying anything, just shakes his head. “It wasn’t-- The first time it was just...all at once, you know?” Tony nods with understanding, and Steve’s shoulders sag. “I knew it was Bucky as soon as we met but it--it never hurt, it never. That’s all this has done.” A line of surprise creases Tony’s forehead, and Steve rethinks what Tony must have known. He shakes his head, brushing it off. “Not a clue.”

Tony looks like he wants to say something -- opens his mouth, almost hesitant -- but the alarm interrupts, the sound of the workshop door opening without Tony’s permission. Both he and Steve stumble, caught off guard, and then Natasha rounds the stairs with a gun tucked into the back of her pajama bottoms.

“Oh, fuck.” Tony exhales. “You’re terrifying, you know that?” Natasha raises an eyebrow at him. “You called me?”  
“Yeah. We lost power.” Tony turns back towards the monitors. “JARVIS, rewind the footage of the primary reactor, I want you to show Agent Romanov the initial explosion. Implosion. Whatever the hell we’re looking at here.” He waves, and the feed on the screens goes from multiple small views to panels of a single, oversized image: the same inky water as before, but before the fragments of shrapnel floated into view. The water is still and silent, and Steve watches with a nervous weight in his gut.

“Cap, you might wanna look away for this one.”

Steve ignores him, and winces at the flash of shocking, electric blue: momentary, but vicious, rising up from the water with a massive arc of foam and burbling aftershocks. At first, Steve thinks it’s the reactor itself, but then pieces of metal and glass begin to float up from the ocean floor, and Steve realizes what they’ve just watched was a targeted explosion.

When Steve looks away, Tony’s already turned to Natasha, using a second, holographic screen to show a recreation of the apparent weapon: a disk-shaped thing with hooks on the sides, something that looks almost like the arc reactor hovering at the center. “It would’ve had to overload the reactor core itself: that’s not just something you do with a cherry bomb. JARVIS scanned and constructed a facsimile of the bomb: the energy signals are similar to the tesseract and the scans on Barton after Loki got him, but the rest of it, I don’t have a damn clue.”

Steve watches the recreation as it churns blue, writhes and explodes, and he thinks of hollowed- out warehouses, of the glowing blue of Jim and Gabe’s weapons as they’d helped him carry

Bucky out through the guards and barbed wire. “It’s Hydra. I’ve seen it before.”

  
Beside Tony, Natasha stiffens. “Where,” she asks.

  
“Italy in ‘42. They were using Bucky’s unit to build a repulsor using the Tesseract as a power source.” Unconsciously, Steve fumbles at his side, remembering the feel of the small, overly- powered taser in his hand. “We ran into whole German units using guns with the same technology. Almost hit me when we went after Zola, if Bucky hadn’t--” Steve chokes on the last sentence, unable to say it. “SHIELD had Hydra’s weapons. Whoever did this, that’s what they were using.”

Natasha swallows, still looking up at the image. “Steve,” she says, muted. “Can I talk to you for a minute?” Her head jerks towards the hallway.

“Bad manners,” Tony reminds them both as Steve follows Natasha away, but he’s already opening up what’s left of SHIELD’s weapons files, cross-checking them with the image JARVIS created. Steve watches the two screens as Natasha drags him into the stairway, eyes fixed on Tony’s work until she stands in front of him, breaking his line of sight.

“He won’t find anything,” she says. “I’ve seen those before. They aren’t SHIELD.” Steve looks back up at the screens, then at Natasha again, unsure. “Then who--”  
“I don’t know. They called themselves the KGB when I was with them, but once I got out I realized that wasn’t possible. There hasn’t been a KGB since 1991.” She frowns. “I never handled these jobs though. My partner was slightly more specialized than I was. Slightly.”

“You had a partner?”

She nods, slowly. “The American -- or, well, we called him that. No one knew who he was. They never told us; he didn’t remember.” Natasha’s eyes dart to Tony’s screens, and for the first time Steve looks at her and understands, just how young she is.

As old as Bucky, when he died.

He shakes off the thought. Natasha’s turned back now, is watching him curiously.

“They call him the Winter Soldier. He’s a Boogeyman: he shouldn’t exist. He's responsible for two dozen high-profile assassinations in the last fifty years, and those are just the ones that he didn’t bother to cover up.” She sits down across from Steve. “He trained me. When Nick had me pardoned, after I defected, it wasn’t my skill set the DOD was hoping for.” Off of Steve’s expression, Natasha raises an eyebrow. “I read my own files. Everyone should.” She lets a thick folder hit Steve’s chest and he catches it, on instinct, looks down at the papers he’s now holding in his hands. The majority of the lettering -- hand-inked, faded with aged -- is in Cyrillic, but he recognizes a series of numbers, and the distinctive SHIELD insignia. More disturbing still, the writing underneath it.

0033578MOSCOW1947 PROJECT:WINTERSOLDIER

Inside the folder are schematics for a--tank, of some kind, human-sized, technology that looks like it should have been inhumane even during war-time. Photos, clipped to those: full-sized metal

tubes, with frosted windows; close-up polaroids of cracks and ice damage, shaking handwriting circling and making notes against each flaw.

A final set of photos: the tank, lit up and obviously active, and the vague shape of a body, floating, suspended inside.

Steve swallows against a lump in his stomach as the blue in the photo turns neon and burns his eyes.

“He’s an asset. A weapon.” Natasha’s voice floats back in as if from somewhere far away. “They kept him in cryostasis between missions. Wiped him clean when they brought him out. If he’s been sold privately, Stark Industries has a few hundred competitors in the US alone who fight  
dirty enough to do this. And if he hasn’t...” Natasha’s eyes drop, just for a second. “Then not even I would know where to start.” She crosses her arms in front of her, whole body stiffening. "This won't be the only attack. They'd never send him out for something this simple."

Steve rubs at his temple, trying to process it -- it’s not that he doesn’t believe Natasha; he’s hardly in a place to consider anything too impossible for reality. But it reminds him of something out of the comic books Bucky used to read when they were little, the “Weird Tales” and “Buck Rogers” issues, men stuck in and out of times not their own. A kind of mystified horror, the possibility of the bright, clean future interspersed with the terror of the unknown and alone. He wonders if it’s more, or less disorienting to find yourself out of time if it happens in piecemeal snatches, rather than one long slumber.

He looks down at the floor between himself and Natasha, and the red of her toenails is cloyingly bright. It nearly sends him staggering, and Natasha has her hands at his sides, holding him steady, before he realizes he’s lost his footing.

“Shit, Steve.” She looks him up and down. “I should’ve noticed. Is it still in and out?”  
He shakes his head. “Just in. Hurts like hell though, don’t know why. Everything’s too bright.” Natasha guides him up the stairs, careful, reaching to make him duck his head at the low, steel  
entry.

“You’re having a reaction.” They’re across the room, now, and Steve hears the light chiming noise of the elevator, signaling Natasha’s sending him to his room. “Do you need me to get you to medical?”

Steve shakes his head. “You know, they used to say this happened if you ignored what your eyes were tellin’ you.” He can hear the accent slip back into his voice -- he sounds young, embarrassingly vulnerable, now, but Natasha just scratches gentle fingers across his scalp. “Never really bought it but, I guess I never had to think about it. It was just, always Bucky.”

“Steve,” Natasha says, quietly. “It doesn’t mean you didn’t love him.” "That’s not what it feels like."  
He waves her off before she can respond.

The elevator pings, and Steve lets himself be manhandled onto it, eyes mostly closed, a brief flash of red hair or the blue of Natasha’s nightshirt enough to make the back of his brain ache and scratch sharp warning back into his head. He feels drunk with it, sea-sick, a memory catching in his head of Bucky holding him up, once, too, muttering about not knowing his limits and the brown in Bucky’s coat as he’d rubbed his face against it. Natasha’s night shirt is soft, but unfamiliar against his fingers when he touches her shoulder, and he staggers into the elevator on

his own, bracing against the side wall and letting her hit the buttons. She catches the door as it shuts, one last up-and-down that doesn’t bother disguising worry.

“Sleep it off,” she tells him; the emptiness in the request says she believes what she’s saying as much as he does.

If nothing else, it gives him a reason to close his eyes. His dreams, at least, are still in familiar black and white.

“Promise,” he tells her, and sags once the doors close tight.


	2. GREEN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Back when Bucky was in basic,” he says, voice even, taking breaths against the nausea that threatens to send him back to his feet. “I used to get these real bad dreams. They’d go through his letters, censor ‘em if he said anything but he got real good at what he wasn’t saying. First time I ever saw somebody get shot at point-blank, wasn’t me pulling the trigger.” He rubs at his forehead. “We didn’t talk about it much. Mostly it was when something bad happened; like we got scared, grabbed onto each other.”

He opens his eyes, and the world is a tepid green.

He panics. There’s a tube down his throat and the world is tinted green and he thrashes, one side of his body heavy and colder than the rest of him, than all of him, and the light is bright and there are hands grasping onto him and he’s being shoved down, strapped to a gurney.

There’s copper on his tongue and he spits on the lab coat of the man holding his arm; it’s red, and he startles, breathing in liquid and gagging on instinct.

A hand comes down across his vision, slapping the side of his face hard enough to sting more than the cold in his skin. He turns his head to the side in supplication and the star on his shoulder, has it always been red?

How does he know that color is red?

The smooth slide of a needle pricks the inside of his arm, and then his eyes slide shut, mind going gray, fading out. His last thought before he slides back into unconsciousness is that he had forgotten, just how red the space before sleep is, too.

Steve jerks awake, covered in sweat and gasping for breath. The first thing he sees is the light from the Tower’s insignia, blue and glowing through the black-out curtains, somehow still bright enough that he winces and squints. His own dream -- nightmare? Memory? What just happened -- plays in his head, and he looks at the clock, finds it damn near three. He picks up his phone and hesitates before sending a text message, brief because he doesn’t know if he’s overstepping boundaries.

_The winter soldier has a metal arm with a red star_

He’s surprised when Natasha responds within minutes, screen going bright and burning the backs of his eyes.

_how did u know that_

Steve can feel his heart pounding, because he doesn’t know the answer. He doesn’t want to know the answer, maybe, because he remembers this part, too: the nights Bucky was away at basic, the letters he got that were redacted or self-censored and lying all to hell, and the nightmares he kept repeating filled with gunfire and increasing precision. The first time Steve had bolted awake at night from dreams filled with blood, hot and red and spilled by hands that were too familiar, when he’d looked down before waking.

Steve feels his stomach lurch, and for the first time in years - decades - he can’t keep it down. He makes it to the bathroom in time to dry-heave into the sink, spitting up bile and choking on air. Nothing else comes, but he can’t make himself stop, a new wave of pain hitting every time he looks up and back into neon blue light.

In the bedroom, he hears his phone buzz. He thinks about trying to get it, but his stomach twists and rebels, and he stays where he is.

He’s still gripping the sink when he hears the elevator ping. It makes him jump, fingers cracking the marble beneath them, but there are only a few people that know the code to his penthouse, fewer who would have reason to come find him in the night. Tony would rather send the AI on his behalf, and Steve isn’t surprised to see Natasha’s shadow as she steps into the doorway. Her hair is too bright, like fresh blood, and he closes his eyes and lets his knees buckle, an awkward half slide to the cool tile floor. The pat of feet is nearly silent, and then Natasha is pressing up against him, her hand on his forearm.

“What happened,” she asks, and Steve crumples without meaning to.

Natasha rubs his back, tentative and stuttering as he gasps for air and tries to regain his bearings. Once he feels like he can talk without breaking, he takes in a shaking breath and sighs, leaning back enough that he can look up and see the ceiling. “Back when Bucky was in basic,” he says, voice even, taking breaths against the nausea that threatens to send him back to his feet. “I used to get these real bad dreams. They’d go through his letters, censor ‘em if he said anything but he got real good at what he wasn’t saying.” Steve remembers the false cheer and deliberately omitted details, the postcards from different cities in rapid succession and the way Steve had known what it meant, the transfers and the promotions and the specialized training, even as his ma was just happy to get the extra mail. “First time I ever saw somebody get shot at point-blank, wasn’t me pulling the trigger.” He rubs at his forehead. “We didn’t talk about it much. Mostly it was when something bad happened; like we got scared, grabbed onto each other.”

“Steve,” Natasha says, quiet. “That isn’t...there’s no documentation of anything like that being possible.”

Steve shrugs. He can’t help the sad smile that crosses his face. “Bucky said he used to get them when I was sick, he just didn’t notice at first because he wasn’t sleeping already. I’d have these fever dreams, all full of lights and sounds, wake up just, terrified. Sometimes Bucky’d be awake too, looking at me scared like I’d have a heart attack right there.”

“I’m not.” Natasha frowns. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

Steve scrubs his face. “He’s got a star on his arm. They keep him in a cold liquid. He woke up and saw it and he panicked, fought whatever they put in him to breathe. So they knocked him out.”

There’s a long, heavy silence before Natasha replies. “How did you know all of that.” “It was him. The Winter Soldier, I saw him. I just don’t understand why.”

Natasha eyes him carefully, looking him up and down for a long moment before answering. “He wore goggles to cut down the grayscale effect. They used to talk about it, sometimes. What he’d be like in a firefight if he could still ‘see the trees.’” She tilts her head, mouth set in a line trying too hard for neutral. “It happened before his handlers’ time.”

Steve stomach churns, acid burning in his stomach in curls he can’t trace. “So why is this happening to me, then?” He hates how small his voice sounds, hollow in the too-big space of the steel and marble bathroom. It leaves him exposed and thinking about his apartment in Brooklyn -- the one he shared with Bucky, that was torn down in the 70s, with a boiler that belched up smoke and burned his lungs and a bathroom too small for both of them to fit, Bucky pulling him into his lap and holding onto him anyway, rocking when he wasn’t too dizzy for the movement.

Natasha’s expression tightens, but it’s gone just as quickly, replaced by a tentative hand on his shoulder. “Try to go back to sleep. I’ll stay with you. Can you stand?” She offers a hand, but he staggers standing on his own, mindful of his weight until he’s mostly upright. He winds up  
leaning on her as they shuffle back to the bed, though, collapsing into shivers and the mattress and squeezing his eyes tight against the aggressive peacocking of greens and blues when she tucks the comforter around him. He feels swallowed up by the bed, absurd, and even in the dark room there’s too much to see.

Behind him, Natasha curls up on the other side of the mattress, close enough that he can feel the warmth from her body. He feels a tentative hand curl against the back of his spine, and her thumb rub against the bone there, something awkward and like comfort. “I know you don’t want to hear this,” she says, voice thick with something swallowed. “But if you really are--linked to him. It's valuable. He's valuable. The intel he might have, Steve."

“If all those stories are true, it doesn’t seem like he’s the guy you want.” Steve shifts, trying to get comfortable against the soft down of the bedding. “Doesn’t seem like you solve a lot of problems arresting the gun.”

“Arresting, no.” She sounds amused by the idea. “I think SHIELD is more interested in melting this one down.”

“That doesn’t bother you?” Steve’s eyes open at that, shooting bright stars of pinprick pain in from the full-length windows and through his skull. “You knew him.”

At that, Natasha hesitates. “The man I knew, Steve,” she says finally, quiet. Her hand stills on Steve’s neck, but doesn’t move, frozen in place. He can feel her nails scratch as her fingertips curl in. “He didn’t want to be what he was. If it’s all we can give him, maybe it’s a mercy.”

Steve thinks about that for a long, silent moment -- long enough that he isn’t sure if Natasha is still awake when he opens his mouth again. It makes it easier, somehow, to ask out loud: to question the dark, when there’s no one he’s sure to be facing but himself.

“Did you ever…”

“No.” Natasha doesn’t sound surprised by the question. The bed dips behind him, and he feels her shift, turning onto her back. “It may have been their plan. We cared about each other. But there wasn’t enough of him left when I met him.”

Steve winces, at that. Lets his eyes fall closed. “I just want it to stop.”

“It doesn’t have to mean anything, you know that, right?” He hears Natasha shift on the chair, watches the dim red behind his eyelids turn true black as the bedside light clicks off. “You’re not controlled by biology.”

Steve shakes his head, chewing the inside of his mouth. “You really think that’s all it is? Your whole--the way you see the world changes, and it’s just some kind of tic.”

“You’d rather be that dependent on another person?”

Steve knocks his head back against the pillow. It’s not that simple, he wants to say, but he feels a chill on his skin and remembers those horrible last days -- the way the color had faded and gone mute, but he’d still been able to see the blue of the water, the red in his own blood when he hit the ice and the world crumpled around him. Remembers closing his eyes and thinking about Peggy, and her lipstick; remembers that last thought of Bucky, and the blue of his eyes.

He’d always thought, if you outlived your soul-mate, the colors washed out quickly. Now he wonders what else it might mean. He doesn’t think about how long it took, for Bucky to die.

Steve’s eyes go hot and ashamed, and he curls onto his side, facing Natasha. She’s already  
looking at him, eyes hazy and distant, fingers tangled in the necklace that curves around her throat. The afghan from the side chair is wrapped around her shoulders. He stays like that, curled and pained and small, until sleep pulls him away again, until the muted reds in the black of his vision turn back to bright, blinding white and the slick, white gloves of a man above a gurney.

Somewhere, someone prepares a mission briefing in a language he understands without knowing, and a sharp, blinding pain cuts everything else out of his head.

*

The next morning Steve’s awake with the sun, blindingly painful even through the black-out curtains. He shambles his way as far as the kitchen before collapsing into one of the bar stools, and Natasha - coffee already brewed, sipping from a mug -- looks up at him, brows drawn.

“Anything else?”

Steve rubs his temple. “They want Tony.”

“Yeah, the explosions gave that away.” Natasha looks up at Steve with an arched eyebrow. “Everything okay?”

“No, you don’t-- It’s not an assassination. They want Tony. It’s a kidnapping. He’s planning on going out to survey the damage tonight; they’ll be sending the Soldier after him.”

“Tony’s already planned for that, he’s got Clint and Hill--”

“Six operatives, same weapons we saw last night.” Steve pours himself a cup of coffee with shaking hands and sits down beside Natasha. “They briefed him with weak points in the armor. They just want Tony.”

“How do you know that?”

Steve thinks back to his dream: the hard rubber bite of a bite in his mouth, the blinding white pain and the fear in his head and the way it shocked out everything -- sound, meaning, color -- for a single, still second before it all crept back in; the fear because there was no significance to it, because once the pain subsided and he was finished gagging desperately, hanging his head, everything around him looked too-bright and wrong and he didn’t understand why.

They’d shown him pictures of a blinding red suit and given him instructions for pulling it apart.  
We want him alive. No fatal injuries.

Pulling himself back into the present, Steve shakes himself and looks down at the cobalt blue of his coffee mug, the way it reflects against the steel kitchen table.

“He’s not going tonight,” says Steve, finally. “We’re sending the remote armor and I’m going after him.”

"The Soldier." Natasha stares. "You're going after-- Steve." She sets down her mug with a careful clink of porcelain on metal. “Whatever you think this is, you're not thinking big enough. He's not another mercenary. He's not a terrorist. You can’t stop him like this. And if this is a chromatic response you won’t even be able to fight him. Aggression can make the reaction physically overwhelming.”

“I think I’ll be fine,” he says flatly. Natasha doesn’t look convinced. “Whoever he is, I have to know. This isn’t negotiable.”

She looks up at him for a moment, assessing in that way that makes him feel pinned, like a bug behind glass. Leans back, keeping him locked in place with a thoughtful expression. “Tell me about him.”

“I’ve told you everything I know--” “I mean Barnes.”  
Steve stiffens.

“You don’t let people close, Rogers. Cut the boy-scout shit, I don’t think you’re all that thrilled they went and defrosted you in the first place.” She eyes him up and down, like checking for a hit, and he freezes in place; he’s not expecting it when she reaches out, touching his elbow with tentative fingers like she isn’t quite sure how to handle this, but wants to. “You’ve got everyone treating you like this is all ancient history but for you it’s been, what, three years?” She shrugs, awkward. “Sometimes it helps to remember they were real.”

Steve can't quite find a fault in that. She isn't wrong: he hasn’t been asked about Bucky but for an exhibit at the Smithsonian, a series of stylized and sanitized questions that left Steve feeling empty and hollowed-out inside, because they talked about Bucky like something made of paper, because it made Steve realize he’s been gone so long, there’s no one left who remembers what it meant that he was here.

“We met when I was six,” he says quietly, staring down at his hands. “I got hit with an asthma attack at the schoolyard. Never had it happen before: panicked and made it worse. Bucky’s sister Becca, she had pneumonia the winter before that. He got me up and calmed back down and walked me home before he even gave me his name.” He smiles despite himself, remembering the water in his eyes, the way his lungs had burned and burned, had gradually faded. Remembers looking up at Bucky -- at seeing him, really, clear-eyed, for the first time. Being too young to understand what he was looking at when the world around him shifted and went technicolor.  
“First thing I saw different was his eyes.” He looks up at the ceiling and laughs at himself. “How’s that for a bad line?” He hears himself sigh, a puncture of air that seeps out like suffocating. “Everybody keeps talking like it’s ancient history and I barely feel like I got the chance to deal with it. They never even found a body, you know? Read a couple hundred of ‘em washed down river. They were still finding ‘em for years. Never...never found him.”

His voice breaks. He runs a shaking hand through his hair.

Natasha shakes her head. She unfolds herself from her chair and stands, hand on Steve’s shoulder. “I’m coming with you tonight. If you do find him, you'll need me."


	3. BLUE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You feel it,” he says, voice rough and burning in his throat, the whole world sparking to prismatic fire around him. The Soldier looks up at him in shock. “It’s happening to you too.”

He was wrong, Steve thinks idly as he looks down at the water: the ocean isn’t black at night, not really, after all. The waves that lap up against the concrete surrounding the reactor are a thick, inky blue and the pier darkens in their wake, leaves echoes and imprints with each shift of chopping water.

Steve shifts, and crouches, pulling his shield in closer.

“You’re too tense,” Natasha says behind him, adjusting the gauntlets wrapped around her forearms. She has a gun in her hand, cocked at the ready, and he knows her utility belt is deceptively fatal: the small charges she carries, the garrote and hand-grenades; at least three more rounds, and two knives, besides. He can’t help but notice she doesn’t have vision goggles on.

“Remind me to work on my inner calm when we’re not out here chasing ghosts.” He rocks his heels in a springing crouch, looks up, even though he knows there’s no roof access not visible from their sight-line. They’re shielded from three angles, guarding the fourth; Tony’s remote  
armor is underwater eight yards out while he mans it from the tower, fixing what he can with what he calls the equivalent of a hammer on a circuit board. “Useless for detail work,” Tony had complained, but Steve watches the faint glow of the yellow against the blue-black of the water and a part of him will always think of the technology expos and flying cars and and the carefully-  
blind-eyed optimism of those last years before Bucky was drafted, Bucky telling stories about their future and about spaceships, time-travel and women with three breasts like they’d all blurred together in a fever-dream of the impossible.

Stabbing pain explodes into a star-burst against Steve’s temple. He winces and his memories go double, a sideways-slide like he can see from the outside in. The world tilts and shifts and he’s on his back and he can see himself upside-down, lying on the dirty rug with blue eyes all crazy wide and looking up at him, like there’s something to look up at, like there’s--something--

Steve comes crashing back to reality with a harsh grip around his chest. Natasha tucks them both down and hauls them closer against the wall, pulling Steve’s shield against them just as the ricochet of a bullet hits the vibranium, dead-center, slicing paint from the metal.

“Shit,” Natasha swears. Steve looks up, only to be hit with a sudden blinding flash of blue, nearly ultraviolet in its brilliance and sudden violence. He ducks his head again, curling into Natasha as he hears gunfire in his ears. This time, though, nothing hits them: there’s a muted explosion that momentarily makes Steve think he’s blown an eardrum, before he shakes the cotton in his head free and realizes something’s been shot, been hit underwater. The waves churn and reflect backwards in green and red and yellow, and Steve hears the intercom in his ear crackle, the spark sending shots of pain down his spine.

“You know, I liked that suit.” Tony’s voice on the other end is mild, and Steve doesn’t bother to uncoil long enough to point out Tony’s spent the last three hours complaining about its lack of motor skill. “Are you and Widow going to tell me what the hell’s going on here?”

The intercom crackles again and Steve winces and claws at it; Natasha pulls it away and scowls into it, and he can barely hear her talking to Tony over the rush of blood in his ears. Stay where you are, Stark, lock down the damn tower.

\- Like hell, that thing just blew up a goddamn suit. You planning on having Captain Doe-Eyes just ask him to stop politely?”

\- He’s better than you and he wants something you have. Stay put. I repeat, don’t fucking move. Over.

She’s silenced the comm before Stark can fight back, shoving it into her utility belt and ducking behind the shield, gun cocked. “He’s here alone,” she says quietly, eyes turned up and wary to the concrete roof of the conversion generators.

“Isn’t that…” Steve’s stomach recoils, and he tenses, and breathes. “Isn’t that good? We’re not exactly ready to take down a strike team.” He knows Clint is within sniping range, would be shocked if Natasha came out here uncovered. But he doesn’t have to see her face to know she’s afraid of whoever this person - the Winter Soldier - is. Steve has never seen Natasha scared.

“It means whoever’s got the leash doesn’t want to risk responsibility for his mission.” “Which is what.”  
Another shot: this time, it grazes the shield and ricochets, hitting the concrete just inches from Steve’s head. Natasha curls in lower and hits the distress button on Steve’s communicator. “You’re in pain. And he’s missed a clear shot twice.” She looks around them, still unable to pinpoint the location of the shooter. “They sent him to kill you.”

Steve opens his eyes, fighting back the pain in his skull because he wants to say something, to argue, to stop -- but there’s another shot, somehow louder, a bullet hitting concrete a foot above their head with an explosion of ashen drywall.

The drag of heavy boots follow, and Steve and Natasha find themselves looking up at the Winter Soldier, holding his gun clumsily -- poorly, both hands shaking like he’s trying to account for a rising tremor. His face is covered by a respirator, and his eyes are blacked with grease paint. They’re rimmed with red and sunken, and Steve is sluggish, so it takes him a beat too long to process the fact that the Soldier isn’t wearing goggles, either.

It’s long enough for the Soldier to tackle him to the ground, left arm strong enough to pin him, fingers against his neck and something awful and blank in his eyes. Steve’s air supply is cut off and he remembers that he’s only the gun, has enough time to wonder who’s pulling the trigger as he scrabbles at the cold steel of his attacker’s arm, gets his legs curled between them and shoves.

The Soldier goes sprawling, rolling back onto his hands and knees with heaving breath and blown pupils. There are lines around his eyes that might be pain, and Steve fights off the compulsion to curl into himself again as the images hit--

\--every part of him hurts. It’s like being split in half and his vision fractures again, sending him stumbling onto the concrete, curling under his shield and behind Natasha. He can see himself -- a shock of red, of brilliant gold, and he recognizes his own face but the parts are all jumbled and his heart beats in his chest faster than he understands, faster than the monitors implanted in his

chest. He hears the Director's voice in his head, the implant will release sedation in four-point- two-five minutes if basal temperature continues to rise…

Steve staggers to his feet. Natasha grabs him, trying to pull him back down, but he takes a step forward, leaning heavily on the wall.

“You feel it,” he says, voice rough and burning in his throat, the whole world sparking to prismatic fire around him. The Soldier looks up at him in shock. “It’s happening to you too.”

“Shut up.” The Soldier fumbles for a gun at his back, but then he’s hissing in pain, and the weapon drops to the floor with a terrifying clatter.

The Soldier looks down at his hands, then at Steve, shocked like he thinks it was something else that caused this. Above the mask, his eyes are creased and dark, like fear, and Steve catches them, expecting pain. Stops, because he doesn’t receive it.

He should. He damn well should be in pain right now, the bright electric of the emergency lights flashing in watery blue eyes, but the light’s receded and the picture’s gone sharp and Steve sucks in a breath and staggers, away from Natasha, clutching the side of the cold concrete building. He smells salt water and leather and the Soldier’s moving closer, a shaking hand gripping a fixed blade knife he’s pulled from his belt. There’s no anger in his eyes, though, he looks -- scared, Steve thinks, and he’s seen this before. Around him, the world tips sideways and he sees himself, overlaid and smaller, imagines plunging the knife into his gut and his own smaller self curling on the ground, bleeding out and gasping a name he--he doesn’t know--

Natasha takes the shot before the Soldier does more than move the knife. And Steve realizes, a beat too late, that it doesn’t matter, because this is what Natasha was afraid of, this is what the Winter Soldier is. Because Natasha is fast, terrifyingly so. Keeps Steve off his game in sparring, overtakes him in the field.

And the Winter Soldier, somehow, is faster.

Steve hears the shot of a gun just a beat too late: a flash of metal, and blinding pain cuts through his side just shy of where his mind’s eye saw it, a ragged tear too high to be fatal, still sluicing Kevlar and flesh and leaving him gasping. He feel burning and the seep of warmth that comes  
with a shallow knife wound, and he can’t help but remember the image he just saw -- the gut-hook knife, the pull like a trussed-up pig, watching his own young self bleed to death on this floor --  
and he drops to his knees, clutching his side. The fear that washes over him, though, that isn’t his own. It’s sharp and guilty, and Steve’s only felt like this once or twice in his life: the winter he spent in a convalescent home, Bucky bringing him their own food and water and watching the nurses like a guard dog at the door. Steve had seen himself, then, Bucky reaching out for Steve’s own thoughts to sooth him, and he’d gotten a glimpse through Bucky’s eye at himself, fragile and thin-boned and god, beautiful. Bucky had thought Steve was beautiful, and Steve had never told Bucky he’d seen it.

What he’s seeing now, though, is bloodier, harder. The emotion that floods through him is horror, thick and burning acid in his gut. But it’s himself, that he’s looking at, through outside eyes, like watching images superimposed on each other: the person he is, but his old self, too, sunken to the floor in twin gasps of clenched-down pain and curled against Natasha, hands clenching her knee. Smaller and more fragile than this world has ever known him. Whoever's watching him, now, this is now they see him.

Beautiful, says the tendrils in his brain that don't belong to him, overwhelming everything else: the real pain in his head and the wound to his ribs, the refracted ghost of a shot to the thigh; Natasha’s chest against his head, now, her hand pressing his down on the injury. Beautiful, and the thought

is his now. All wrong, always was, and not even for him -- and the last thing Steve thinks before he slips into consciousness leaves him chilled through and frozen.

There was no one else, who knew him that way. And no one else would have thought of him like that.

*

He’s awake, but he can’t move: they’ve strapped down his body and his left side is prone, held down by his own weight and useless, limp metal, cold biting through him and making his whole body feel heavy like his skin is sloughing off the rest of his body.

A bit is pushed into his mouth and he bites down, tasting rubber and bile. The gurney underneath him is too cold, metallic to be the chair, and the sudden burn of antiseptic through his thigh tells him what’s happening next. He shoves against the gurney but hands wearing sickly blue gloves hold him down shoulder to thigh as the needle slices through his leg, the burn and thick oppressive ache out his punishment, reminding him in points of flesh, because he can take it now and he should have been able to do it then.

The needle’s hot and it slices his skin with brutal efficiency, but the bit’s removed halfway through and oh, he understands this part. The Soldier thrashes and twists his own neck as if to break it,  
but another blue, clawing hand grips around his throat, pushing at his jaw until he has no choice but to open up. Disembodied hands - four pairs; two men - hold his nose and his jaw until he gasps, and then a tube’s stuffed down him, scratching down his throat and into his lungs and filling his mouth with the fresh copper tang of his own wet blood.

The tube’s followed by a cold, viscous liquid that coats him, thrown out from a bucket, and hands are pulling on his clothing and rubbing the fluid across him and the tube inside of him won’t let him scream.

Bucky gasps uselessly around the tube, air pumping in and out without his permission, swallows his own vomit as it rises in his throat--

and Steve shoots up in a hospital bed with a familiar name caught in his throat. It won’t come out, but the rest of it does, and he rolls onto his elbows and over the side of the bed, coughing up bile and seeing his own dreams again, the same blue, blown eyes full of fear and stupidly, restlessly familiar.

“Welcome back.”

Natasha’s voice greets him from behind his back, the side of his hospital bed not soiled by vomit. She’s already hit the call button, though, and Steve rolls gingerly back onto the mattress and looks up at the textured alabaster ceiling, breathing through his nose and trying to stay calm. It takes him a moment before the room stops spinning, and he closes his eyes, holding in the dark for as long as he can.

“You knew,” he says, quietly, finally.

“I’m sorry, Steve.” He feels her hand brush his wrist. “I couldn’t tell you until I was sure. I couldn’t risk--I didn’t know what you would do if I was wrong.”

He keeps his eyes closed and doesn’t move. “I never saw his face. I could be wrong.”

There’s a long, hollow pause before Natasha replies, “you could be.” She scrapes a careful nail down his palm, and lets him go. His stomach has calmed, so he turns to look at her, and he stiffens, sitting up quickly enough to make his head spin all over again.

The colors are gone, his world washed out in scales of black and white. Natasha’s hair is gray again.


	4. BLACK

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first thing Steve asks for, once he’s cleared by medical for personal effects, is a pencil and a sketchpad. He sets the colored pencils down carefully on his bed stand, running his fingers over the grayscale rainbow. He hesitates on a stick marked Imperial Violet and thinks of scared dark eyes, locked on his behind the mask.

The first thing Steve asks for, once he’s cleared by medical for personal effects, is a pencil and a sketchpad. Natasha raises a manicured brow but says nothing when Tony sends down a Moleskine notebook and a box of Prismacolors, a smaller set of charcoals with a note in a hazard scrawl, we’re not gonna let ‘em just ice the poor bastard.

Steve sets the colored pencils down carefully on his bed stand, running his fingers over the grayscale rainbow. He hesitates on a stick marked imperial violet and thinks of scared dark eyes, locked on his behind the mask.

He picks up the charcoals, and uses heavy lines to chart the cut of the Soldier’s cheekbones. A strong, angled jaw-line tilted up in desperate fear; the heavy door of a tank that fills cold from the bottom. The freezing air and flash of blinding-body pain and Steve catches himself lining curls of vapor with white charcoal hard enough to rub and tear the paper.

It takes him minutes, and when he’s done he rips the picture from the notebook, hands it to Natasha with a kind of blunt resentment. Her breath catches in return, eyes fixed for a moment on the dark, blurred sketch of Bucky’s frozen features. “The American,” she says, neutral with fixed effort.

“James Barnes,” Steve tells the empty space in front of him as if he’s reading from a memorial. “Sergeant for the Howling Commandos. He went MIA in Switzerland in 1945. His last mission caught Zola; gave us Schmidt’s location.” He lets his head fall, smirk bitter between his teeth. “Shoulda been proud. Whole country woulda been.”

“Who told you all of that?” She touches the dark sketched line of Bucky’s mouth with a careful thumb and hands the paper back to Steve, watching him closely.

“Senator Brandt sent a wire to Zurich.” Steve bends the edges of the paper without thinking, watches the empty white around Bucky’s grayed-out body roll and curl against his fingers. “Nice way of saying it. You know they never told his family what happened to him? Flag and a star and never got any answers. Classified mission. None of us knew.” He focuses again, looking back down at Bucky’s face, flat and grayscale and barely captured on sketch paper. “Never got to wonder what they would’ve done to me if I hadn’t put the plane down.” He huffs, eyes dragging from the black and white charcoal to his own hueless skin. “Captain America isn’t supposed to be a widower.”

“Steve…”

He shakes his head, and she stops, doesn’t push the subject further. “I need to know where they’re keeping him. The Winter Soldier.” His voice cracks a little, at the end there, but he doesn’t acknowledge it and Natasha doesn’t react. “What do you know about this thing they keep him in?” He taps the paper, drawing Natasha’s attention to the scattered half-sketches of the tank itself, patched together from oversaturated fragments, fever-dreams that Steve can’t cohere into thought.  
He draws an imagined line along a thick length of metal tubing. “Looks like they’d need a hell of a lot of power.”

Natasha nods in agreement, taking the drawing again. “And a backup generator. The earliest tanks ran on technology similar to Howard’s super-reactor. Palladium core. If his core temperature rises between a predetermined set of variables, the core leaks and the suspension liquid turns toxic.”  
She hands the paper back. “Handy anti-theft measure.”

“Okay.” Steve closes his eyes, but all he sees behind them is darkness; there’s no one left in his head but himself. “Where could someone keep this thing?”

A beat of silence struggles between them. Natasha purses her lip. “Cryosync,” she says finally, so clipped and still Steve isn’t sure he hears it.

“What?”

"Whoever's holding the leash, they knew we were coming: not just us, they knew about the suit." A crease forms in her brow. "Who would have access to that information."

Steve isn't sure he understands, entirely, but he answers anyway. "Just Stark and, SHIELD, I guess, since the jet dropped us--"

"SHIELD knew." Natasha's face is lined and tight, and he sees it now, her own nerves. Seeing the Soldier has shaken her, too. "SHIELD knew, and the American's orders were changed." Her  
voice could cut stone when she says, rough, "I know where they could keep the tanks." Steve's already looking for his jacket. "Where?"  
“It’s a repurposed Stark Industries R&D facility based out of Culver University. The contractors there were partially responsible for funding Banner’s experiments. After the lab accident, most of the researchers involved were killed. It’s been used as a high-level SHIELD storage facility since the Gamma Project failed. The vault is so heavily classified no one but the director has access.”

She reaches for a thick, dark sweater, burying her gauntlets and the shock-absorbent gloves beneath oversized sleeves with torn thumb-holes at the edges. Steve watches, amazed even in black and white as Natasha slithers out of herself like a skin, whole body coiling and shrinking into something unassuming, something -- harmless, he knows, she wants the people around her to think.

Invisible.

“So how are we going to get in if nobody has access to it?” He imagines at least half the goal here is to make sure they find it before Coulson has a chance to; the likelihood of calling up and asking for the keycode is low. He watches Natasha fit her utility belt underneath her sweatshirt, and she looks up at him like he should already know the answer.

“You wanna ask stupid questions, or you want to get us a car?”

*

Culver stands empty at the edge of a long, grassy lawn, pock-marked by craters and artillery

shells, a haphazard war-zone in suburban Virginia. The corpse of the college is a monster in unto itself, rotting bricks along its side as it slouches slowly into decay. The glass of its great halls and walkways is destroyed, moss creeping up its walls and the landscaping, at one time clearly and carefully manicured, growing wild over heavily-boarded doors marked with the same rusted-out warning signs.

HIGH LEVEL GAMMA RADIATION EXTREME DANGER  
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW

Natasha looks at the arched doorway with a complete lack of emotion and dips into the brush beside it, finding and grabbing onto a small, steel door buried by plant matter. There’s a keypad, clean and new sunken into the metal, and she shines her phone over it, waits for the light beep that announces the code’s been cracked.

“Should we be--” Steve gestures to the sign, and Natasha shrugs.

“There was never any fall out. SHIELD’s been active here since Banner destroyed the building’s east wing in 2008.”

“Then why all the signs?”

Natasha pulls the doors beneath them open with the creak of steel hinges, and a long, gray arc of emergency lights brighten immediately, illuminating a staircase downward.

“Cuts down on tourists.” She starts down the stairs, and Steve follows her, shield held at his side and resisting the urge to move in closer, shadows creeping closer all in black and white, creeping, stretching lines like they mean to reach and snatch. Natasha doesn’t seem to share any of his fear; the stairwell curves and she follows it easily, calm like she’s been here a dozen times before.

“Banner’s lab was downstairs,” she says, gesturing somewhere off to their sides. There’s another hallway, a new row of lights, and Steve realizes, dumbly, a reason for all of the concrete. “This takes us below that, into Stark’s old bunkers.”

“Bunkers.”

Natasha turns to him, eyebrows raised. “Gotta brush up on your Cold War history, Captain.” The stairs stop abruptly at a large, metal door and another keypad -- this one, with a retina scanner, but Natasha doesn’t seem phased, so Steve looks elsewhere and tries not to worry, either. “This wing of the college was updated in the fifties on a grant from Stark Industries. Officially, Howard added a fall-out bunker, in the event of a nuclear strike. Unofficially…” She hits a series of patterns on her touchscreen and holds it up to the scanner; it emits a series of beeps, and the door hisses as it opens into damp, weighted dark. “Stark funded early work on cryogenics and live-subject stasis. The college successfully used Cryosync technology on primates as early as 1954. Classified of course.”

Steve feels a knot form in his chest. “Of course.”

The door in front of them has a small metal label beside it: Stark Industries Cryosync. Steve finds himself staring, the text below it too dim to read in darkened gray, but then Natasha’s hit the keypad, and the doors are sliding open.

Inside, the lab is dark in a way that the rest of the bunker isn’t. The whir of a backup generator hums from a corner, but all Steve can see is the flicker of white lights on a black console, the dim light of Natasha’s phone, flipped to illuminate the room around them, as it slides over the husks of

empty metal tanks. All different versions, just slightly off-center to the ones etched into Steve’s brain. Natasha’s already moved closer to them, sweeping light along the edges, holding on dark imperfections that Steve imagines show rust and age.

“You said these were all SHIELD contracted.”

“Stark Industries, ‘52 through ‘79. Self-generating palladium core.”

Steve finds himself staring at the tanks, close enough to touch but unable to do it. The glass is clouded with age and filth and Steve tries to imagine being on the other side of it, wonders if the inhabitant was conscious or not when the doors were sealed closed.

“What were they using them for?”

“Same thing they do now: temporary stasis. Injury or deep-water, but there’s been talk of modification for interstellar missions.” Natasha snaps a series of photos of the earliest tank. “SHIELD talked briefly about using them to preserve bodies indefinitely, but the blueprints disappeared in ‘89 in a massive security breach.”

“Tony’s never gotten a look at them?”

“I think SHIELD would rather none of us know these are here.” Natasha pulls, and one of the doors groans open, air lock long since cracked and broken down. Feeling useless in comparison, Steve finds himself moving slowly around the rest of the room, looking up at walls of locked filing cabinets. The room itself seems to be some sort of converted storage unit: the technology left in it  
is obsolete, the rotted trunks of overhead cables hooked into banks of computer tapes that have long gone silent, stopped spinning their broken records. His fingers rub over the Stark Industries logo etched in metal and covered in dust, tattooed onto the edge of one of the behemoth computers.

“Did Stark ever actually come down here?” Steve finds himself pulling at the handles of cabinets, unsurprised when they give slightly, but don’t open, locked with slowly-rusting joints. The humming is so quiet at first he isn’t even sure he hears it; he finds himself touching the wall as he moves along its length and further, listening as the noise grows lower, deeper, until he feels it in his skull. He looks over at Natasha to find she’s still pressing on clouded glass, apparently unaware of the sound.

“Do you hear that?” Steve looks up at one of the walls of cabinets.

“Hear what?” She comes over, standing beside him and tipping her head.

“Humming. Like a generator.” Steve steps closer to the wall, sliding his hands along the edges. He feels air. “There’s a door here.”

“There’s nothing in the SHIELD blueprints.” Natasha shakes her head, but she’s already eyeing the space in front of her, backing up to let Steve search for the seam. He finds it in the crease between two file folders and pulls, hears an airlock and a hiss of pressure and the door opens into another room, lighter than the last and illuminated from the inside, dim and casting heavy shadows, the echoes of pipes and creeping circuitry.

“Steve.”

Steve hears Natasha say his name, but it disappears into chaos, fading under a rush of noise like everything else when he sees the tank -- the active tank, emitting light, glass frosted over and tubing connected to the ceiling and floor, churning viscous liquid in and out of a coffin chamber. His heart thuds in his chest and somewhere, some part of him hears his shield clatter to the ground

at his heels -- hears Natasha again, is distantly aware she must pick it up. Doesn’t care, because the glass of the tank is so cold it’s opaque, and it burns when he touches it, but he still rubs his hand across it, lets his own heat warm it until the image beyond it clears.

He chokes, staggering backward with a hand to his mouth.

On the other side of the glass, Bucky looks back at him in frozen black and white, colorless and cold in a way he’s never been, the way Steve has never even imagined he could be. There’s a tube down his throat and wires hooked to his chest and temples, heavy scarring across his shoulder and torso connecting that vicious-looking metal arm. His hair is too long and he has the edges of a beard starting uneven along his jaw, but all Steve can see are his eyes: open, wide and sightless, and his pupils are blown so big that all Steve can see is black, the blue drained out and as empty as the rest of him.

Steve doesn’t realize he’s on the floor until Natasha’s beside him, hissing into her communicator.

\--Culver, Stark, don’t play cute. They’re your damn toys. Extraction, Rogers is in bad shape. We’ve got a body in stasis. There’s a murmur of a tinny voice, but Natasha cuts it off with a bitten- off growl. I don't care, just turn on a damned tracker. Don’t pretend you don’t have Cap tagged up like your armory.

Communicator off, Natasha holds her phone up to Steve. The photos she has are gray and dim, but still easy enough to see; it doesn’t stop Steve from staring dumbly at them until Natasha describes them, feigning color.

“This tank is Stark Industries too. Mid-eighties from the look of it.”

Mid-eighties. Howard would have been…

“Howard knew--” Steve looks back up at the tank, and he can’t get enough air to finish the thought.

“He knew he was selling. He didn’t know what they were doing.” Natasha looks around. “I was here five years ago.” She swallows, shaken and clearly not trying to show it. “The Winter Soldier is a recent acquisition.”

Steve bends in half, resting his forehead against his knees as the weight of Natasha’s saying sinks through. “Jesus.”

“Steve…”

Natasha’s cut off by the loud screech of an alert signal, sending her to her feet, and Steve struggling to get himself under control. Lights flash on either side of the tank in bright white bursts and Natasha looks at the small console next to the tank and then back at the tank itself. “Damn it. His basal temperature’s spiking. The sensors are picking up brain activity and a heart beat.”

Steve feels a pain between his eyes, and he sucks in a shaking breath again. “He’s reacting to what you’re feeling. You need to calm down.”  
Steve looks up at her incredulously, heart still pounding like he’s running, like he’s in fear of his life. He damn might as well be: he looks up at the tank again and the metal is thawing, water pooling in delicate dark ripples on the concrete beneath it and white lights flashing and Steve remembers what Natasha said about palladium, thinks about ripping the door off of its hinges but he can’t even get off the floor.

She’s beside him again, crouched and holding his wrists. “Steve, listen to me.”  
Steve shakes his head. “Tasha, he’s going to die, I can’t watch him--I can’t see it again, I can’t--” “No, you need to listen to me now. You’re afraid, and his body’s fighting the stasis hold. I need  
you to breathe, do you understand me?” She runs a hand over his hair and he only has a moment to look up at her, miserable, before another shock of pain forces his eyes closed again, before his lungs seize and knot and leave him choking.

“I can’t,” he squeezes out. The world is closing in on him in dark lines of black and white.

The shrill alarms for Bucky’s vitals trill louder and Steve doesn’t know who’s pain he’s feeling: if it’s his panic or Bucky’s, or if this is the way his world ends. If Bucky’s going to drown this way and there’s nothing he can do to stop it.

Steve’s light-headed and gasping for air and there’s nothing he can do to make himself stop it, the blare of the lights and alarms from the chambers dragging him back into the nightmare in front of him. A sick kind of personal, selfish fear locks his joints and leaves him shaking and he’s barely listening when Natasha touches his cheek with a soft brush of gloved hands, says, I’m so sorry, and he doesn’t notice that she’s moving again until a shock courses through the base of his skull. The pain is impossible and incomplete and it only lasts a moment, and then the fear is gone -- the fear, and everything else, sinking into blackness, empty and engulfing.

The last thing he’s aware of is the shrill sound of the alarms around him, of Natasha maneuvering his head into her lap, stroking his forehead and saying to him quietly, It’s going to be okay.

He wants to believe her. So he does.

*

Steve wakes up in a hospital bed.

Natasha is holding his hand, and the world is still in black and white. He sucks in a breath, and stares up at the patched gray ceiling.  
“What happened?”

Natasha startles, squeezing his fingers without meaning to. When she looks down at him, her eyes are dark-rimmed and tired, but Steve can’t find a clear reaction, and he can still feel his own pulse. Calmer, but not naturally -- he’s been given a sedative, he’s sure, and he waits for Natasha’s answer like execution orders.

“It’s touch and go,” she says, “They have him downstairs now trying to bring his temperature up without tissue damage. Stark was able to stabilize the tank once his vital signs got back to normal.”

“Once you knocked me out,” he says with a wry smile. Natasha ducks her head, but doesn’t return it.

“I’m sorry about that.” Her free hand reaches over, sliding against the mattress to touch the back  
of Steve’s neck. Whatever injury she may have caused, he’s sure has long-since healed; he doesn’t feel pain, but she’s haunted anyway, forehead creasing and a frown crossing her features, more naked than he’s ever seen them. “I couldn’t make you stop panicking.”

“You saved him.” Steve squeezes her hand back. “You know that’s--you know what he means to

me.”

“If I hadn’t, I would have let him die.” She says it like she’s not sure what she thinks of it. “He won’t be the person you lost. You need to be ready for it -- for who he is now, if he wakes up.”

Steve closes his eyes again, focusing on the dark behind his eyelids. It’s easier than looking at Natasha directly, at seeing her face in the absence of color. “I don’t care who he is now. He’s still-  
-” Steve opens his eyes again, and he can’t finish the sentence. He already knows how absurd it will sound -- what Natasha will think, desperate loyalty holding on to a fairy-tale.

Steve reaches up with his free hand and covers his mouth, hiding the frown that threatens to shatter. When he’s gotten control again, Natasha’s still looking at him.

“He’s still my soulmate. Whoever he is now, this wouldn’t still be happening if Bucky wasn’t in there.”

He waits for the rebuke that never comes. Instead, Natasha frowns and dips her head, still for a long moment. When she breaks the silence it’s with words so thin and quiet that Steve isn’t sure  
he doesn’t imagine them at first. It wouldn’t be the first time recently he’s heard voices in his head. “I thought everything would go gray,” she tells him, curling up in her chair until she’s sitting on her legs. “I heard about the gems before, there have always been rumors about the Tesseract. So every time I opened my eyes I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to see any of it anymore. That Loki would dig in too hard and there wouldn’t be anything left to bring back.”

And this, Steve knows, is the closest Natasha’s come to talking about this part of her life with anyone, but he squeezes her hand and lets her pretend on her own terms, like this is a conversation they’ve had a hundred times over.

“The organization I worked for, they knew who he was, at some point, they had to have known about what happened to you. But when I met him, I think they assumed he’d been broken. It was a selling point on missions. He wasn’t capable of love.”

Steve ignores the sour bite in his throat at Natasha’s retold dismissal, even as he recognizes it as a lie to them both. “Thought it wasn’t about love.”

Natasha fixes him with a look. “I want you to be right. But whatever happens…it isn’t your fault, Steve. You did everything you could.”

Steve can’t help the wetness that leaks out from the corners of his eyes when he shuts them this time. “You don’t know that. I should have gone back. I should have looked for him. I should have known-- I thought I knew him better than anyone but I didn’t even notice--”

“Steve.”

Steve takes a breath, and opens his eyes again. Natasha’s leaning closer, and her hair hangs colorless in the edges of his vision. He’d never thought about it, before, all of the things he wasn’t seeing. “I didn’t do a damn thing.”

“If you’d done any of those things, he wouldn’t be here now.” She looks down at their linked hands. “And neither would I. He saved me too, once. I owe him.”

Steve takes a shaking breath, and nods -- as much to himself as Natasha. Around him, the world feels muted and silent, but that isn’t new, and he thinks again about those last, awful days before the Valkyrie, about the slow, creeping way his world had bled into gray-scale.

“The Tesseract was blue,” he says quietly. “I remember seeing Schmidt and I could still--his face

was faded but I could see it.” He bites down on his cheek; the memory isn’t his to feel sorry for. “I could see the water when I hit it. The sky was still blue, too.”

He wonders when the color went out of Bucky’s eyes. Wonders where he was -- what they were doing to him -- when it happened.

“You couldn’t have known, Steve.”

“I should have.” It comes out harsher than he intends it. “He’s my soulmate,” he says, more quietly, and the misery in his voice is a physical thing.

Natasha lets out a breath, soft and shaky. Her nails scrape into Steve’s palm, but she doesn’t say anything, and they lapse into silence, the shivering light of Hydra’s artillery still burning bright in the back of Steve’s brain.

It’s the only color he has, this time. The room around him stays dark as a tomb.


	5. YELLOW

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What were we,” Bucky asks, looking at a wall. “You--it was easier. And then everything got bright.” He rubs at his eyes with his flesh and blood hand. “What happened to me.”

Steve doesn’t know how long he’s been drifting. He hasn’t quite slept, but time’s tangled up together, a long stretch of black and white broken only by the shift of the bed when Natasha crawled onto it, moving closer and resting the back of her skull against the headboard. With her eyes closed it’s the closest to calm that Steve has seen her, the thing in her that’s always coiled, rested, for the moment, no longer immediately ready to pounce. The shadows in the room have retreated into thready shards and Steve finally lifts himself onto still-shaking arms, trying to avoid jostling Natasha even as his head swims, the sedatives in his system and the shock from earlier leaving him aching and off-center, the world swimming around the edges.

He feels hands against his shoulders, holding him steady.

“So much for a quiet get-away,” he jokes, then realizes Natasha might take him at his words. “I just gotta use the sink. Besides,” he adds, trying for levity and coming up flat. “I’m not even sure I’d make it down the hallway.” He can feel her breathe out, and she shifts to help him stand, lets him wave her off and stagger toward the bathroom.

The version of himself that looks back at him from the mirror is hollow-eyed and hollowed out, shaking as he leans in to look at his own face. Watery and off-white, and Steve shakes himself as best he can and cups his hand underneath the sink, bringing water up to slick back his unkempt hair and slide down his neck. He hasn’t even bothered to turn the light on, and he leans across the counter with more pressure than necessary, the meat of his palm hitting the switch and casting pallid skin into unnatural, yellow hues.

Steve looks at his own reflection again, the straw of his hair and the sick tinge of his face. The sight has him staggering backward, back hitting the drywall hard, and the thud brings Natasha, hovering at the doorway and watching him nervously. “Steve?”

“I see them,” he says, and the air is punched out of him, knocked from his lungs like a physical blow. He’s looking down at his hands like he could make sense of the flesh, the veins underneath them and the hospital bracelet wrapped around his arm. “What does that--what’s happening to him?”

Even as he says it, a rush of second-hand fear hooks into his gut like a bowie knife, jerking and tearing him in half until he’s gasping with it, bending over. Four men around him, and he’s warm but it isn’t right, and he doesn’t recognize faces but oh god, he could see this anywhere -- the hands and the way their voices sound, the sickly sweet lie they tell as they hold him down tight, as the scalpels and the tubes and the new tests begin, the words they whisper that sound all tied up like praise. Half-familiar, like someone who used to think of him as human.

Steve fights the urge to bend double against pain that isn’t his. “Natasha--”

She’s already grabbing him by the arm, pulling him upright and forcing him to follow her out of the recovery room. “Come on,” she says, clipped, free hand shaking hard in a move that powers up her gauntlets, blue light snaking around black kevlar. “He’s in the sub-basement.”

Steve doesn’t have to ask to know what the sub-basement is for: a direct line to the escape hatch, if it’s needed; a way of transporting specimen directly to the Triskelion, directly to the Fridge. Steve’s only heard of SHIELD’s long-term containment in bits and pieces, knows it lacks the sophistication of anything they saw in the tanks Bucky had been kept in.

Natasha pulls up next to him beside the pressurized door marked ICEBOX. She raises her phone to the keypad and something red hisses and beeps, making Steve wince: brighter, now, more saturated by the moment, and by the time they’ve stepped into medical the whole world is back in full starburst hues. It isn’t painful, this time, Steve notes with detached interest, but its jarring, all the same, the medicinal white walls of the room around them a startling contrast to Natasha’s hair and his own bright shield, to the gloves and goggles of the doctors when they open the doors, flustered.

“Captain Rogers, Agent Romanov, you aren’t cleared to--” “He’s regained autonomy. How long?”  
One of the four medics present -- an intern maybe, younger, thin-voiced and nervous, eyes wide and fixed on Natasha with the blind terror of the kind of new hire who’s still only heard half-truths about the Black Widow -- offers up a notebook, even as he scrambles back like he’s been burned. As she looks over the files, Steve takes in the room: the cryotank sits in a corner, now-empty, the hinges popped but not broken and the whole thing taken apart with some care, as though whoever did it had designs on reusing the thing again. It screams in color now, glass long-since stained green and the leftover liquid dripping yellow over black and blue pipes, and Steve drags his eyes across the wet trail on the grated floor to the tub they have Bucky physically strapped into, now, unconscious but still braced in with metal gauntlets around his chest and hands. Steve doesn’t  
have to get closer to know there are magnetic cuffs around his thighs and ankles, too, or that if Bucky wakes up, not a damn piece of it will matter. For now though, he has an oxygen mask on and he’s breathing on his own, hitching, loud breaths that come in odd intervals, like his lungs are still working out how to run on their own power.

“How long has he been like this?” Steve hears Natasha like she’s filtered through a wind-tunnel, and the voice of the doctor who speaks first is farther still, tinny with fear and breathless with nerves.

“We’ve had him out of the tank for just under a half-hour, but his body’s been running entirely artificially. We defibrillated him six point two minutes ago. The computer recorded a heart-beat after a fourth attempt.”

The closer Steve gets, he can see that he was right: there are thick metal sleeves above Bucky’s knees, shackles at his ankles underneath the water. He’s naked and all Steve can think is how different he looks, now: the arm is almost an afterthought against the sheer violence of the rest of him, the muscle and sinew and tight, pale skin, built like one of Howard’s weapons, built to destroy. He’s beautiful, because every version of Bucky was beautiful: eighteen years old and just filling out as he mouthed down Steve’s stomach for the first time; twenty-one and curled up tight around Steve that first night in their own apartment, kissing the back of his neck while he shook and couldn’t cry; twenty-four and so hard up for it he’d pushed Steve onto his stomach and pushed his slacks aside, screwed them both into the floor with his pants still on, rubbing fabric burn into Steve’s pale skin. It had been three weeks later, Steve had found the fist-crumpled

conscription letter and the report date for basic training, and he’d shoved into the shower while Bucky was still in it, never mind that it didn’t fit two of them even when the other one was Steve. Bucky had been broad-chested and tapered, stomach flat and twitching, but nothing the army had done to him ever made him like this -- like he’d been built to fight; like everything about him was drafted up for war.

Steve touches the water, having kneeled without realizing it; it’s vicious, warm but not hot and strange to the touch, and Steve slides his forearm into it, touches Bucky’s chest and flattens his palm over it until he can feel a faint heartbeat. There are scorch marks in the skin just above Steve’s fingers.

“Steve.” Natasha looks up from the clipboard she’s holding, hands it back to the intern without looking in his direction. “Be careful.”

Steve shifts, and slides his hand up, fingers tracing the line of Bucky’s squared-off jaw. “He’s breathing on his own.”

The doctor nearest Steve seems to hesitate before responding. “Y-yes. The subject is completely self-sustaining.”

“What about his-- When will he wake up?”

“We have no way of knowing how much damage he may have sustained. If he’s experienced trauma, he may respond to electroconvulsive therapy treatment--”

Out of the corner of his eye Steve sees a bright spike of blue on one of the room’s many monitors. The banks of computers light up with a steady, warning trill.

Steve looks from the monitor (brain activity, judging from the bursts in color, the sensors taped to Bucky’s forehead and temples) back to Bucky. He’s twitching, now, his flesh and bone hand shaking near-violently under the agar-thick fluid, and Steve stands and spins, bracing himself against the wave of dizziness he feels when he turns to look at the doctors, begins to feel a disjointed fear well up in him from somewhere outside his own brain.

Bucky.

“All the same. I’m taking him with me.” Steve looks over their shoulders, at Natasha when he says it.

“Captain Rogers, I’m sorry, but you can’t--”

“--SHIELD is legally responsible for the safety of its patients, and right now he’s a danger to himself this way--”

“--the operant’s a liability, Captain Rogers.”

It’s the final voice that hits him: the head of the team, Steve assumes, a gray-haired man wearing white gloves, but the image Steve sees when he looks at him is blue: blue latex, holding his throat while he pushes a rubber bit into his mouth; blue, the pale color when the ice frosts over, the feeling of it, of gasping for air and his lungs tightening up in his chest, eyes fixing on the man in front of him and the way he jots notes onto his notebook as he watches, as Steve’s vision tunnels and his consciousness grays and the liquid, cold and frigid has reached his chest before the world goes black and he stops thinking at all.

Steve snaps back like a rubber band to a horrified yell and the crash of heavy metals, and he turns to see Bucky struggling against his cuffs, shaking the tank and straining so hard his shoulder turns

an angry red. There’s a snap and Steve hisses because he isn’t sure what’s given, but then Bucky’s arm is free and he’s swinging violently, hitting the assistant nearest him clear in the chest.

The young woman lands on the floor, unconscious but still breathing. Bucky isn’t violent -- he’s terrified, eyes wide and fixed on the man Steve’s talking to.

Steve looks back toward Campbell, and holsters his shield. The sweeping nausea in his stomach is rising and falling with Bucky’s struggles against the cuffs that hold him. “His name is James Barnes, he was a sergeant in the US army. I’m listed as his next of kin.”

He trails off there, unsure what direction he’s supposed to be taking except for the pull leading him back to Bucky. From somewhere to the side he hears Natasha - He’s coming with us. Got a problem, take it up with Nick. - but he doesn’t see her until she’s already beside him, standing between him and the doctors as he kneels back down to Bucky’s side. He’s wide-eyed and panicked, no recognition in frigid blue eyes, but Steve touches his face and wills him to still, and Bucky reaches up and grabs his wrist with his right hand, clutching at his pulse point and looking from their hands to Steve’s face, fighting something like shock.

“It’s me, Bucky, it’s me. You’re safe. I’ve got you.”

Bucky shakes his head, but doesn’t move as Steve pulls the cuffs free one by one, pulling up layers of flaking metal from the tub in the process. Freed, Bucky seems to struggle for a minute, unsure, and then his right arm comes up to wrap around Steve’s neck, clutching them together as tightly as he can, against the weight of his left side, heavier than Steve imagines is accounted for by the arm.

“Okay, I gotta lift you up. I’m gonna get you somewhere safe. You’ll be okay. You’ll see.”

And Steve means it -- he means it more than he has anything, would tear the world apart before he lied to Bucky like this again. But it doesn’t stop the burst of light that clings around his eyelids, or the shift in reality as he hooks into a memory that doesn’t feel like his, stares out of someone else’s eyes, chained into a van, hands behind his back, kneeling and to a bar. Every so often, a jolt of electricity courses through the bar, giving his legs and arms a jolt that keeps him frozen, keeps him from moving.

“You did well today,” says a man Steve thinks he recognizes from somewhere. “You’ve given your country a gift, Soldier. And now we put you back where we found you.” The man in his new line of sight: blonde, older, wearing an expensive suit and expensive shoes and ensuring that, bent and shackled this way, the latter are always in his line of sight. He grabs Bucky’s chin and hauls him up at a too-high angle, forcing his back arched and his throat constricted until he’s  
wheezing to breathe, until it hurts to exist. “You’ll be safe there, until we call on you again. We do always take care of you, don’t we?”

In Steve’s mind, he sees himself nod his head, slow. He’s horrified to feel that he’s doing it in real- time. Against his chest, at least, Bucky doesn’t seem to have noticed; he’s still gasping for breath, wheezing and rattling in unsure lungs.

Natasha, however, misses nothing. She stares at Steve even as they slide down a back hallway to the sub-basement’s emergency tunnels, a series of concrete and rebar tubes that spit out into a vacant lot marked for construction and just big enough to accommodate a quinjet. The door triggers an alarm that sends the basement into red-lit chaos, and Bucky stiffens and digs blunt nails into Steve’s shirt, pulling closer against him as though he could crawl inside.

Steve cups his palm tightly over Bucky’s ear, holding him in place and trying to block out the light and sound. But Bucky heaves and gags anyway, and the pain in his head ricochets back to Steve

in the worst possible way, a dull persistent thud that pounds guilt out in repetition, the heavy reminder that Bucky is only feeling this because Steve failed, and he keeps on failing.

He trips, and Natasha catches him, hand on his back pushing him forward as they pick up speed along a straight trench of tunnel. “I don’t know where your head’s at, Rogers, but this isn’t your fault.”

Steve huffs in disbelief. No amount of lying will keep the howl of that wind away, the creak and tear of awful metal. He looks at Natasha. “You don’t know that.”

“What would he have said?”

Steve cradles Bucky closer, shifting him into his chest in deference of the lopsided heft of the left side of his body. Still wet with sticky, clinging fluid, covered with Steve’s sweatshirt, Bucky’s fingers knead the fabric of the shirt Steve is wearing like he doesn’t believe it’s real, the pads of his flesh fingers rubbing across worn cotton, pressing into the dips of muscle underneath. Steve would know Bucky anywhere - in nightmares; in death - but he’s never seen him like he is, now, like someone else is wearing his skin.

“Yeah.” Steve scowls and picks his pace up. “Look where that got him.”

*

The quinjet’s waiting for them in a small patch of dirt and ash, turbines kicking up purple plumes of it, betraying its location behind Stark’s cloaking mechanism with familiar dust devils of ash and smoke. Natasha swings herself out of the emergency hatch and Steve follows her with only minor difficulty, shifting Bucky’s weight and wrapping his own jacket tighter around Bucky’s body.

The cloak around the door shimmers and vanishes as the door to the plane opens, leaving the surreal image of space opening into a great white nothing. It’s enough to throw Steve into memories of the Tesseract and its glowing portals, and he doesn’t realize how vivid the recall is until Bucky shudders and clutches against him, left hand digging in hard enough to bruise. Steve wills the image away and brushes away Bucky’s hair.

“It’s not real, Buck. It was a long time ago.”

Bucky shakes his head, but he doesn’t say anything.

Inside the jet, the back has been cleared for a makeshift gurney, hooked into the wall and braced against the floor for support. It’s cold and it gleams a bruised blue and purple, and Steve looks at Natasha, hesitant. She pulls a small pile of shock blankets out from a cache in the medkit and uses one to cover the table before Steve lays Bucky down, puts another one over him that he immediately curls into, shivering and looking up at Steve. His eyes are cold blue and familiar but the emptiness coming out of them is unspeakably strange, and Steve feels his own world shifting, reaches out to lean against the wall for support.

“Do I get a briefing here or are we just all pretending Steve doesn’t have a hostile in the back seat?” Hill turns in her seat, craning to look at Bucky.

“He’s not a--this is Sergeant James Barnes of the US Army. Infantry 107.” Hill’s eyes widen. “Azzano in ‘43... Bucky Barnes?”  
Steve’s jaw clenches and he doesn’t answer, kneels down until he’s nearly eye level with Bucky’s blank,unfocused stare. He hears the hum of the reactors that power the engine, the nearly imperceptible jolt of motion as it rises, but he can’t make himself focus on anything but Bucky, the

rising panic he can feel refracted in his brain, burying shards in his gut like a shattered kaleidoscope. It’s memory and instinct and disconnected thoughts and Steve wonders if this is what it’s always like, for Bucky -- if this is his, if this is their normal, now.

He puts a hand on Bucky’s shoulder, leaning in as close as he can. “Just focus on me, okay? I know you don’t--” He chokes, trips over the words as they leave his mouth. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t remember me right now. You just gotta hang onto something.”

Bucky closes his eyes, and Steve feels a sympathetic pang in his own chest, like doubt, the lingering image of himself - his old self, reedy and thin and different through Bucky’s eyes, like the camera’s been adjusted and blended in soft light, all gold and pale and clear blue eyes, beautiful in a way he’s sure he never was. This close, he’s catching the tendrils of Bucky’s fractured memories, and he focuses and tries to pull in closer, ignores the way the scene shifts and leaves him dizzy at the edges, catches another glimpse of himself, fleeting, and then another that Bucky holds onto tighter: Steve, on his back in Bucky’s bed with an old spread out underneath him, skin slick with sweat and gasping and Bucky stroking his face, his hair, peppering kisses along his chin and telling him to breathe. Still kids, and Steve places the memory and grabs onto it tight, focusing on it from his own end: how overwhelmed he’d been, how utterly terrified, stupid in love and stupid in general, Bucky’s family at church for the morning and the two of them fumbling and unsure and Steve all of sixteen, no idea what he was doing and so trusting in Bucky that it hadn’t really mattered.

Bucky’s eyes fly open and the memory disappears like cigarette smoke, lingering heavy around them and holding thick in Steve’s lungs. It’s gotten to Bucky too, and it’s the most focused Steve’s heard him when he asks in hitched breaths, eyes wet and wide -- “real?”

It’s something that Steve hasn’t considered: the idea that Bucky hasn’t believed these memories, that he’s been implanted with so many lies that he has no reason to believe what he’s seeing is true. The thought terrifies Steve, and all he can do is squeeze Bucky’s fingers, nod and let himself lean more heavily against the cot. “Yeah, Buck. It’s all real.”

Bucky turns away from him, looks up at the ceiling. He seems to consider this, expression going closed-off and unblinking, as hard and empty as Steve has seen him, ever wants to see again. There’s something hollow in his eyes and for a second Steve feels cold, hears the whistle of a train car, and he looks at Bucky’s arm and wonders if he’d be able to keep him down without hurting him.

Steve watches his chest rise and fall, and feels nothing, when he closes his eyes.

There’s nothing else to reach out to, and Steve stares at the red star on Bucky’s shoulder and wonders if the silence is deliberate.

*

At night, Stark Tower stretches like a summoned thing, arcing towards the sky in an eerie, pale blue. They land assassin-silent but Bucky jerks anyway, sits ramrod straight with eyes fixed on nothing.

Steve’s up and across the hold before Natasha can stop him, blocking the punch Bucky throws with his human hand and catching the bionic fist in his own, grunting against the reverberating pain as his bones rattle against the sudden, violent force.

“Bucky--Bucky, it’s me, it’s me.” He knows it doesn’t mean anything, but there’s a part of him in there that understands it, still, and he freezes again, like he did in the medbay, goes still and submissive with the blanket around his waist. It’s like lifting dead wait when Steve picks him up

this time, wrapping the blanket around him and hauling him in. “It’s Steve, remember? I got you.”

“Steve.” He tries out the word like he’s unsure of it against his tongue, and Steve feels a shock of refracted pain, tastes metal in the back of his throat. Like being hit with electricity, and by the time he comes back from it Bucky’s already blank again, eyes wide and hollow and head shaking on instinct. “No, I don’t--I don’t know, I don’t.”

The colors in Steve’s vision flare and burst and he sees the man in the medbay, electrodes this time, sees photos of himself - this self - that all hurt.

The tarmac is windy, and Steve’s grateful for the way it dries out his eyes, gives him an excuse to pretend he doesn’t hear Natasha when she calls to him. This close to Bucky, the flashes of memory are like knife-wounds -- he sees himself, this self, and feels sharp pain in his temples, watches the images in his mind shift to Bucky in the war for the Red Army, fighting alongside German troops in a Hydra mask, in a dozen lives he never lived, each one as bright and blinding  
as the rest. He feels hatred and fear and when he sees himself he feels nothing at all: it’s all drained out, a silent movie on screen, but it’s still the image that Bucky holds on, when nothing further than that will take.

He closes his eyes and presses his forehead to Steve’s throat, and Steve leans into the doorframe while they wait for Hill to open the doors. “Where’d he come from?” Bucky’s voice is hoarse.

Steve hesitates, looking at Natasha’s raised brow before answering. “We grew up in Brooklyn. You had two sisters, lived with your parents.” There’s a beep and a hiss as the doors open to the access elevator, and Steve shuffles them into the corner, trying to retain as much space as he can.  
It doesn’t keep the wary look from Bucky’s face, but he doesn’t lash out, and he stays where he is, still focused on Steve.

“What were we,” he asks finally, looking at a wall. “You--it was easier. And then everything got bright.” He rubs at his eyes with his flesh and blood hand. “What the fuck happened to me.”

Steve doesn’t know how to begin to answer that question: not in an elevator, God knows; not with others watching. It isn’t the point, anyway, he guesses.  
“You’re my friend,” Steve says, because no matter what else, this part is true. “I love you.” Bucky doesn’t look satisfied, but he doesn’t say anything else, and the access elevator doors open  
into the back of the penthouse that’s supposed to belong to Steve, should he want it: all burnished  
metal and sleek, clean tile, open and expansive and sterile and empty. He nods to Hill, spares a glance to Natasha, and then he’s helping Bucky into the well-lit bathroom, setting him on the closed toilet seat and finally, finally, looking at him clearly.

“You’re kind of a mess,” he says, curling his mouth into a smile he doesn’t really feel.

Bucky looks down at himself, still naked but for the blanket now drying tacky with the fluid from the tank. He looks up and down at Steve’s uniform, covered in the same viscous goo, and scowls.

“Whatever. Doesn’t matter.” Bucky shrugs. “No effect on performance.”

The way he says it makes something in Steve recoil. “Yeah, okay.” He peels the blanket back from Bucky’s torso and notes the thin lines of scarring that span his left side, the arced curve like an angel’s wing that stretches out from his spine. Like someone pulled him apart like a toy, unstuffed his insides and sewed him back up.

Steve plugs up the tub and turns on the faucet, focusing on the task in front of him and trying to ignore Bucky’s lingering unease closing in on him like ice, the way he’s pulling the sticky blanket

closer even as steam rises up from the water as the basin fills. “You with me, Buck?”  
Bucky stares at the water, and they both tremor with a sudden, muscle-memory chill. “Just get it over with.”

Steve hates the flatness in Bucky’s voice, but he’s already stood up, dropped the blanket, steps around Steve towards the bathtub before Steve has a chance to process. Stepping in nearly drops him, though, and he’d have fallen entirely if Steve hadn’t moved fast enough to catch him, getting them both wet, Bucky seated, eyes wide, in sloshing water.

“Shit, it’s fucking hot.” He sounds surprised to the near point of fear, and Steve realizes belatedly just how little sense this must make to Bucky, how dumb Steve was not to have seen it. He rubs a gentle hand along Bucky’s spine, and helps him lean forward, carefully, as he turns on the faucet and replaces the lost water. “What are you doing,” Bucky asks, voice coming out as almost a murmur.

“It’s just a bath, Bucky. You used to help me with ‘em when we were kids, I’d get sick, remember?” Steve picks up a washcloth and lathers it, tracing meandering, careful paths along the silvery lines that etch steam-pink skin.

Still leaning forward, Bucky’s face is mostly obscured, hair hanging from his eyes and clinging to his face. He shakes his head and droplets of water hit Steve in the chest, adding new damp to his already-filthy tactical armor. Steve urges him forward and pours water over his hair, getting the worst of the goo out of it before he goes for the shampoo.

“You lied before.” Bucky doesn’t move, holding still as Steve runs soapy fingers through his matted hair. They catch in tangles and Steve winces when he pulls to free them, hates how Bucky doesn’t react to it at all. Like pain’s been trained out of him with everything else, and as easy as it is to take care of him like this, Steve hates whatever made Bucky this submissive.

“Lied about what?” Steve pushes his shoulder back, urging him to rinse.

“What we were. You get…” He gestures, slapping water, the closest to frustrated Steve’s seen him yet. “You get close. Everything’s too bright, and I start feeling like-- But it’s you. They’re yours.” Bucky rubs at his face. “Don’t lie to me.”

Steve takes a breath to steady himself, but he knows Bucky can still feel it, the nervous energy and jittering fear. “You saw,” he says quietly. “You got it just fine.” He stands and reaches out,  
careful, helps Bucky out of the tub and into an oversize towel, using a second one to pat his hair dry. “We’ve known each other since were kids,” he says with what he hopes is a calm that settles. “That’s the first thing I remember. Seeing your eyes in color.”

Bucky watches him carefully, but the colors stay in focus, and Steve’s mind stays his own.

*

Steve has stayed in the tower a grand total of four times, since its remodel -- still, the dresser is filled with clothes in his size, and it’s easy enough to find Bucky a sweater and thick pair of sweatpants. He’s as compliant this way as he is about everything and Steve feels a sweep of nausea as he slides socks over Bucky’s toes, imagines decades of some twisted version of this, cold water and a pressure hose and being trussed up and defaced like a monster, like a gun, hauled in and out of war zones like heavy artillery.

Dried off and warm now, Bucky’s lids are drooping, succumbing to an exhaustion-and-injury

fueled stupor. Steve remembers it wasn’t that long ago he’d been thrown in the tank with a knife wound in his thigh, and he regrets that he forgot to check on its healing, wonders if there’s even anything left to see. He thinks again about the thin scars across Bucky’s rib-cage, and helps haul Bucky’s legs up, tucking him under the thick down covers.

“Don’t go” Bucky mumbles, half-buried into the pillow. He sounds so much like himself -- like he used to be -- that Steve physically hurts with it, can’t help but reach out and grab Bucky’s left hand, threading their fingers together and kissing Bucky’s knuckles.

“I’m staying right here, Buck.”

He doesn’t say anything else, but his eyes slip closed, and it only takes a few minutes for his grip to go slack, limp in Steve’s own. He gives one last squeeze and sets Bucky’s arm back down against the mattress. If he turns he can see the skylights in the floor to ceiling windows, and Steve focuses on those, on the vague tinge of his own reflection, slack-shouldered and faded, pressed into his chair. He rubs at his own eyes and shakes off the image. Beside him, Bucky shivers, and Steve isn’t sure he’s ready for whatever waits in both of their heads.


	6. ORANGE

The light always caught early in Bucky’s bedroom.

Not much past six, Steve supposes, blinking hazy in the orange and red and yellow light through the muslin curtains, weak vision focusing in on the dirty spots in the fabric in front of him, the sounds of Bucky’s family and shuffling shoes downstairs, and the sudden drop of silence that follows the careful catch of a door, the chugging shudder of a car engine and the smell of exhaust through the open window. The weight of the air leaves him coughing, and he’d become so accustomed to the weight around his stomach that he doesn’t even notice it until it’s moving, the body beside him curling up and around him, rubbing his back and kissing whorls across the uneven curve of his spine.

“What’d you tell ‘em,” Steve asks when he can breathe again, voice still hoarse with forced-out air. He feels Bucky lean in, shake his head against Steve’s neck.

“Don’t matter.” Callused hands slide along Steve’s sides, lifting and rolling him until he’s lying on top of Bucky, until he’s staring into sleep-hazy eyes, lidded and blue and looking at Steve like the whole world stops just out of this bed. “Got better things going.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “Not a dame, Buck. Sweet talk don’t work on me.” He doesn’t move, though, and when one of Bucky’s hands slides underneath the waistband of his boxers, lower, Steve hisses

and bites his bottom lip, arching, spreading his legs on instinct as warm fingers brush the insides of his thighs.

“Bet I could get you wet like one,” mumbles Bucky in his ear, urging Steve forward, legs sliding around Bucky’s waist. “Get you to open up for me all nice and sweet, bet you’d do that for me Stevie, wouldn’t you?”

Steve nods into Bucky’s chest. Bucky’s fingers have found the soft skin behind his balls, are pressing in and rubbing deftly, brushing his hole every so often but not applying any pressure, not giving him what he needs. A frustrated noise pulls out of Steve’s throat and Bucky chuckles, free hand rubbing over his back.

“Easy, easy baby, shh.” And Steve knows Bucky is doing this just because he can -- because Steve said it wouldn’t work, because Bucky’s an ass, even like this, because he gets off on seeing Steve like this, wrecked and undone. “Gonna take care of you real good.” His hand pulls away without warning, and Steve groans, even when Bucky’s thigh comes up to replace it, even when there’s the pop of a tin opening and Steve smells the thick medicinal tinge of petroleum jelly. He squirms, grinding himself against Bucky’s thigh; above him, Bucky laughs, and uses one hand to pull him up again. His other slides right back into his boxers -- slick, this time, and surprisingly warm, and Steve gasps when a finger circles his entrance, careful but firm and pushing in just enough.

“Oh--come on. Bucky.”

Another laugh, throaty and affectionate. “I got you, Stevie, you’re alright. Fuck, you look so good right now.” Pressure as he slides his finger in to the second knuckle, and Steve holds his breath, going still as he adjusts. “You’re beautiful, you know that? Gorgeous. Just--perfect, god, I love you so much--”

Steve coughs awake to Bucky kneeling over him, knees tight around his ribs, his metal arm pressing down on Steve’s windpipe. There’s a knife just below it, shaking in Bucky’s flesh and blood hand, hard enough that it grazes Steve’s skin. It’s something beyond fear, that Steve hasn’t seen from Bucky in--years? Decades? All of it, to them. It’s the nervous tic of helplessness. Bucky’s afraid because he doesn’t know how else to react.

“Bucky.” It barely comes out a whisper, adrenaline and oxygen deprivation leaving him hoarse. It seems to trigger something else in Bucky; he scrambles off of Steve and pushes himself against the footboard, eyes wide like he’s seen a ghost.

“No.” Bucky pulls the knife away and waves it between them. “None of that was real. It couldn’t-  
-” He shakes his head, anger giving way to an almost helpless confusion. “No.”

Steve takes Bucky’s flesh and blood wrist, pulling the knife from it and setting it on the bedside table. He’s careful, but the movement still makes Bucky jump, landing in a crouch at the foot of the bed and projecting distress so thoroughly Steve feels like he’s looking at the world in hypercolor, sees red in the pupils of Bucky’s eyes and gleaming off of the star on his shoulder, his own failures refracted back at him in gleaming technicolor.

They’re not touching when the images hit, but it doesn’t matter: Steve crumples, all the same.

His memories come in sharp, hot fragments, and it’s the warmest he remembers feeling, should feel, curls in on himself on a damp brick floor, away from the bars, the hallway that seems to stretch endlessly when the lights are off. Illusions, of course, meant to contain: twenty-five paces from the door; maybe thirty. He counts each beat of the footsteps when they come, listens to the buzzing din of an electrified door when there’s no one else in the...building? Room?

The memories come in fragments, but he remembers them, all the same. They repeat like faded film, scratched black and white and the memory of color: a boy, slim with blue eyes and hair like straw, and the asset reaches out with his hand, flesh and bone. Closes his eyes and remembers feeling skin against it, stretched thin over sharp ribs and warm, body-heated. There’s a tightness in his groin and he curves in on himself, mistakes it for pain, but the memory is thick and heavy in his head and his mouth is still full of blood when he wraps his lips around a name, unrecognizable but for body-memory, a ghost in the chamber.

His left hand slides down over his sweat-and-water covered stomach. He’s naked, but it doesn’t matter. He grips his cock, hisses at the pressure and the way his hips jerk. Not pain, and he doesn’t-- He knows this, some part of him does, and he closes his eyes and sees wisps of echoed sunlight stretched over imagined skin, his own body, smooth and intact, sliding down, touching, the catch of gasped breath from a faded face above him. Remembers tight skin, and warmth, and thin thighs wrapping around his shoulders as he presses two fingers inside, and he squirms against damp concrete and bites his tongue, claws the floor, comes with a harsh gasp and streaks of semen that dirty the floor in front of him, leave him shaking and ashamed, afraid even though he’s the only one here.

There’s no point in trying to clean up the mess. His handlers will know. They always know; he’ll be punished for it. The scarring on his thighs and groin fades, but never disappears, and he touches the edges of an electrical burn, tacky with drying come. He doesn’t mind, in a twisted way. Some nights, it’s all that reminds him he still feels this.

The asset doesn’t bother sleeping, tonight. He focuses on the blue eyes until they slip out of focus.

....

He doesn’t know when the shots begin.

They burn, thick and viscous and leave him writhing on the gurney, doubling in on himself until the fire ends. When the pain subsides, the doctors throw him a tube of something slick and tell him to stimulate himself, looking at him with disgust as they do it, as though it’s below them, as though the very idea of it is evidence of the asset’s weakness. It isn’t the first time they have given this order, but it is the first time they’ve left him alone, and he realizes immediately that this is a test he is meant to fail. His body aches, but it doesn’t cooperate, cock limp and lube-slick, unresponsive against his thigh.

After seventeen minutes he lies back on the gurney, dropping the tube and his hand beside him. They’ve done something to him; something is different. He thinks of Natalia, and feels nothing. He thinks of earlier still -- images, flashes, the memory of color -- and his stomach clenches, but his groin is still.

At twenty-six-point-two minutes, a doctor and two orderlies return to the room along with long familiar armored soldiers, another syringe for sedation. They hook it directly to his IV and he must have performed, because this is a kindness: he is usually awake, when they put him in the tank.

Even with his metabolism grogginess sets in quickly, and the asset hears the doctor dictating notes to a young man with a computer. Chemical castration achieved within minutes of first injection.

He wonders what it means, but the drugs are thick in his head and he’s unable to form the question.

He doesn’t dream about the boy, after that.

When Steve jerks himself back this time, he’s the one that’s shaking: his whole body is tacky with sweat and pale, gasping and looking at the fear in Bucky’s eyes.

“Bucky,” he says, quietly, because he doesn’t know how to ask, doesn’t know yet how freely these bits of Bucky’s fractured past are being given. “Are you..you know I don’t care if--”

Bucky pushes down his full weight on Steve’s hips. He’s hard, tenting the sweatpants he borrowed. Steve bites his own lip and does not respond, feels a sudden rush of absurdity for even thinking the question. Of course, they wouldn’t think to… Of course, they wouldn’t permanently alter a weapon. Still, he feels the violent reverberation of pain in his thighs and stomach and watches Bucky’s eyes, wide and wild behind skewed hair, and wonders how long it’s been since his body was his own. Wonders how long since its responses have been those entirely of his choosing.

Bucky looks from Steve to his own right hand where it’s clutching the mattress, back again like he can’t quite put the pieces together. “You can’t be him. You did something to me.” He’s shaking his head, looking somewhere off to the side. His gaze is glassy, far away. Steve reaches out, and he flinches.

“No, Bucky, I wouldn’t.” Steve doesn’t know where to begin. “It’s me. It’s still me. We were kids, it was a long time ago. It doesn’t have to matter if you don’t want it to, just please, don’t--”

Bucky’s off the bed before Steve gets a chance to finish. He grabs the knife from the dresser and shoves it into his waistband; there’s a window, that opens out onto an emergency escape, and Bucky’s out and over the railing before Steve can even think to follow him, can consider where he’s going, whether he needs to let the others know. He settle, in a shaking voice, for calling the AI.

“JARVIS?”

“Captain Rogers? Sir?” The AI sounds sympathetic. “May I assist you?”

“Yeah, actually I--maybe. I don’t. Just-- Can you, is there any way you can tell where Bu-- Sergeant Barnes went? If he left the Tower, I mean.”

There’s a moment of quiet, and then the AI speaks again, a disembodied voice from nowhere. “Sergeant Barnes’ heat signature shows he’s presently six stories below this one, sir. He no longer appears to be moving.”

Steve frowns. They’re at least thirty floors up. The wind whistles through the open window.

“If it’s any consolation, sir.” The sliding glass pane closes, slowly; the AI again, Steve supposes. “At present, he’s on one of the balconies. There’s ample shelter from the wind. I’ve turned on the Tower’s exterior heating.”

Steve rubs his face. It doesn’t make him feel better, exactly, but it takes the immediate sting out of Bucky’s exit. “Okay, um--thanks, JARVIS. Just, I guess. Let me know if anything changes?”

“You are to be alerted immediately if Sergeant Barnes attempts a complete escape.”

“Uh.” Steve has no idea if the AI is merely guessing at his own wishes, or repeating an older set of instructions. He isn’t sure it matters, in any case. He slides his hand through his hair, and ducks  
his head, and braces himself for the seemingly impossible task of standing up. “Thanks, JARVIS.” “Of course, sir.”

Under his feet, the carpeting feels obscene, thick and rich and like sinking into quicksand. Steve’s unsteady on his feet, gripping the wall for purchase, and he looks at his sweatpants, lying on the floor, and feels jittery, trapped, too tight in his own skin. He rocks on his heels and looks up at the ceiling.

“Hey JARVIS? One last question. Can you tell me where the gym is?”

*

It’s all much worse in color.

Steve swings himself onto the parallel bars and lifts his head towards the purple shadows of the high-vaulted ceiling, trying to pick out the structural beams and not see the images flashing through his head. Some sick collaboration of his own memories and Bucky’s, a fractal of violence and guilt that echoes in and across itself in unnerving, vibrant color.

\--The numb bite of ice and the din of what he knows is blood loss keeps the pain from setting in, really, even as he tries to roll his neck and fails, knows on instinct that it’s broken -- that he’s broken, that he shouldn’t have survived….something, fragments, holes in the aching memory of color. Out of the corner of his eye he sees a dark stain on white snow and hears the din of voices in a language he knows he shouldn’t understand, echoing a voice that makes him wish he could still shiver. He look up at the sky and that’s when he notices, and that’s when it all stops mattering anyhow. The clouds are wispy and pulling but they don’t block out the sun and the treeline is its own shade of somber gray.

There aren’t any colors left and he lets himself float into the emptiness that threatens to pull close around him, into the voice he doesn’t recognize that speaks in frozen Russian.

‘The Americans last came through here two weeks ago. It’s impossible.’

Steve exhales sharply and brings his body down into a dip, holding it until his muscles burn, squeezing his eyes shut tight.

\--the clouds shift and turn to another skyline, the bright blue and dark choppy green of water and a seaside carnival, Fourteen years old and still too giddy to know how to be scared to death, and Bucky had pulled Steve into a photo booth and kissed him with tongue in front of the flash, made him go red and squirm, and Bucky buys the pictures and puts them in his wallet and Steve flushes all over again and doesn’t say a word.

Bucky kept those pictures in his wallet until the day he died.

Steve feels a tension in the back of his head but he shakes it away, hauling himself up over the bars, into a full planche. Sweat beads his forehead and it’s calming, somehow, having the focus: grounding because it’s present, because it reminds him that he’s here.

“Morning, Cap.”

Steve smells gunmetal and coffee, glances up the stairs to find Tony staring down at him. His hair is sticking up at odd angles and he’s clutching a coffee mug as though it were a power-source on par with the reactor, but his eyes have lost the purplish pallor that seemed all but painted on, a chosen accessory to wealth and extravagance when Steve had first met him. Now, he’s eyeing Steve with a strange sort of assessment, even as he makes his way down to the gym floor.

“Tony.” Steve picks at the wrappings at his palms, wincing at the pull of gauze on raw skin. “Up early?”

“Or late.” Tony shrugs. “I just watched last night’s feed. Greatest hits edition.”

Steve looks up, at that, and finds Tony standing far closer than he had been, fixing Steve with a level stare and tapping fingers against his mug. His eyes are sharp, but not pointed, or angry. He looks...cautious, maybe. Worried, if Steve were feeling generous.

He’s not. He attempts to push past Tony, but Tony catches his arm. Only the possibility of pulling Tony against the stairs and causing genuine damage makes Steve stop.

“JARVIS didn’t pull up anything on a retinal scan so I had him run facial recognition through SHIELD’s database -- disturbingly accurate, by the way, some of their archives will pull up identities that shouldn’t exist -- and I got a partial match. Figure I got a ghost in the machine, but then the cameras pull up this.”

Tony slides out his phone and Steve looks down against his better judgement to see a looped image of himself -- grainy, dull in black and white but himself all the same, cradling Bucky to his chest, still swaddled in Steve’s jacket. His head lolls to the side, but the heavy fabric covers most of him --

\-- but for the corner of the star, a dark blotch on his arm, but visible, still, if someone were looking. Tony was looking.  
“You want to tell me what the boogeyman’s doing on my balcony, Rogers? Or why he’s wearing James Barnes’ face?”

Steve’s heart jumps into his throat, fight-or-flight kicking in faster than it has any right to. He doesn’t blame Tony, not really -- but he has no idea where to take Bucky if not here: he’s sure Natasha has safe houses, but nothing equipped to handle the Winter Soldier, if Bucky were to degenerate further, if anything were to...

Steve doesn’t realize how hard he’s gripped the stair railing until he hears wood splinter, the crunch and sudden violence of it cracking into his fist. He looks up at Tony in time to see him take a careful step back, free hand out in a pacifying gesture, palm up and towards Steve’s chest.

He looks down at his own hand; there’s an inch and a half of wood sticking out like a splinter. Tony winces; Steve pulls it out with a dull sort of surprise. He’s focused more on the crushed beam of wood. “I’ll...I can…” He has no idea if he can pay for it, really. This is Stark Tower; for all he knows, Tony walled the whole damn gym with giant seaweed stalks from the bottom of the goddamn Mariana Trench. Steve looks down at the blood on his palm, at the puncture wound already healing over underneath it. He has no idea what he’s doing here.

Steve doesn’t realize his breath has gone shallow until Tony’s got a hand on his back, angling him back down the stairs. “Woah -- easy, Cap, breathing’s good. Keep doing that.”

The echo of a different voice and the same instructions leaves Steve seeing ghosts all over again, and Tony takes his arm and guides them both across the room, until they’re sitting on a bench, cushioned so that Steve feels like he’s lost his center of gravity. He leans heavy against the wall and closes his eyes, and he sees Bucky in the glass again, frozen and gray.

“See, there you go.” Tony spots a water bottle and hands it over, looks at Steve expectantly until he takes a few, careful sips. The water catches in his throat, but it stays down, and he lets the thermos roll to the ground beside him. “Did I say either of you were going anywhere?”

Steve counts down on his breathing the way Bucky used to, hears the ghost of him in his head,  
three, two, one. “You knew about the Winter Soldier,” he says. “How?”

Tony shrugs, still fixed on Steve. “Rumor mill cooks up a guy with tech better than mine, you don’t think I’m gonna know about it?” He leans back, and shakes his head. “Sounded like bull until Nick gave me some of my dad’s things. He had these--blueprints, all from the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s. Last set were dated 1990. Stasis chambers, cryovac. Stark Industries had been in talks with SHIELD and NASA for the better part of a year, then, bam, backed out of everything. Billion dollar deal; almost cost him his place on the board. After he died I always figured someone else was pulling the strings, but then I found this stuck in one of your comics.” He produces a yellowing comic, seemingly from nowhere, and hands it to Steve. “Real page turner.”

There’s a folded, fading sheet of graphing paper trapped between one of the inside pages: of Bucky, Steve notices; an image of Steve somehow using the shield as a parachute, Bucky held by the waist and shooting a rifle into a slavering crowd of vulgar, cartoonish enemy troops.

“Bucky hated them,” Steve says quietly, setting the comic aside with careful reverence, all the same. He looks down at the caricatures again, hesitating: no more he and Bucky than the exhibit at the Smithsonian, than the people they are now, but Steve feels...closer, somehow, seeing it again, remembering the way Bucky used to throw the newest issues at him when they came with their rations, his horrible, god-awful habit of getting his mouth in close to Steve’s ear, grinding into him in the dark, biting his lobe and muttering whatever half-baked catchphrase his teen-sidekick counterpart had come up with this month, grinning like he’d caught the canary when Steve groaned and cursed and came against their stomachs. Oh my god you like it, and Steve had always swore against it and turned a blinding red, and Bucky had always gone ahead and done it anyway.

Steve realizes how long he’s been hesitating and shakes himself, rubs his eyes, and unfolds the graphing paper. A blueprint, he realizes, because of course it would be -- Howard’s impatient scrawl in the margins, his precise lines and annoyed reworkings and another hand noting APRIL 54 in dark, black ink. The paper bears the Stark Industries logo, and Steve pauses on it before the pieces fit together, before he realizes what he’s seeing when he looks at the full image.

It’s an arm. He’s looking at the internal blueprint to an arm.

“What.” Steve fights the urge to drop it, and his hand shakes, rattling paper. Tony takes it from him and sets it on his lap, leaving it visible to both of them; Steve scrubs at his face again and stares forward, leaning heavily on his elbows, heavy on his knees. “What am I seeing here.”

“Early prototype-slash-science-fiction. Howard wouldn’t have been able to make anything like this for decades, and his concept for a neural hook-up is amateur at best.” Tony has that look, though: the weighted, tight one he gets when he talks about his father, when he wants to do a better job of hating him then he is. “Neural-linked prosthetic. I’ve incorporated reworkings of some of the support structures and response mechanisms into the most recent suits, patented de- weaponized versions for a half-dozen medical prosthetics, all in R&D but--the potential, here.” He shakes his head. “I just don’t get-- If this guy’s real, if they were already doing this kind of thing, why was dad sitting on this? Why wasn’t he buying them out?”

Steve looks down at the comic again, shuts it before he can get caught back up with the ghosts inside of it. “Maybe it wasn’t about money this time. The Winter Soldier isn’t a mercenary. The rest of it, the tank and the cryo…”

Tony nods, expression gone grim. “Always figured it was part of the ghost story.”

Steve shakes his head. “SHIELD’s got a stasis chamber in Virginia. They’ve got a half-dozen tanks from a couple decades back. But he’s new, B-the Winter Soldier.” Steve swallows, and Tony’s got that look again, the one that still makes Steve feel a little like an experiment. “Natasha says they’ve only had him there for five years, maybe less. They must have taken him out before

this. The doctors in the medbay, when he woke up--he knew them.”

Tony looks at him, assessing, for a long and heavy moment. “And Mr. Roboto told you all of that?”

Steve scowls. “He’s not-- It doesn’t matter. If someone in SHIELD was controlling him then they’re trying to get at you and we don’t know why.”

“Of course we know why.” Tony gestures back down to the paper on his knee. “Sounds like they need to upgrade their product.” He hits a button on his phone and talks down into it, even as he folds up the graphing paper, carefully, takes back the comic and slides it between the pages again, as though he were filing an important document. “J, I need you to look something up. Justin Hammer was arrested in 2010, give me SHIELD contracts with HAMMER or the Stane Corporation through that date.”

“Searching, sir, it appears a private contract was made with Justin Hammer’s charity, the Life Foundation, in 1994. The funds were written into the budget each year as charitable expenses, for research into advanced prosthetics and medical stasis.”

“Well fuck me.” Tony looks at Steve, who’s biting the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste the copper tinge of blood. “Wonder where the hell they kept him before Culver freed up.” He only pauses a beat before adding, “and they were still using Howard’s hardware. Typical.”

“Tony.”

“Right.” Tony lifts himself off of the bench with a groan, taking the comic, the blueprints with him. “Looks like I’ve got some admirers. I’d better figure out why the hell SHIELD thinks kidnapping’s a business option; maybe you should try old Saint Nick, see if he’s got any idea who might want me bad enough to send Full Metal Pinocchio after me. Uh. No offense to your…” Tony trails off, reduced to awkward silence in the first time Steve, at least, has seen. He turns at the top of the stairs, instead, gesturing vaguely with the comic, making pages flutter. “This was the guy though. The chromatism.” It isn’t quite a question, and Steve stares up at him, the corner of  
his mouth pulling down a bit more than he’d care for.  
“It doesn’t matter,” Steve says. “Pretty sure the good guys aren’t supposed to do this to anybody.” Tony snorts. “Hate to break it to you, Cap: nobody’s the good guys.” He stands again. “And  
you’re wrong, incidentally.” He doesn’t bother looking at Steve as he heads back up the stairs. “Why the hell would you pull out the big guns if you know they can’t fight your biggest target?”

Steve doesn’t have a response, to that. Instead, he fiddles with the water bottle sitting beside him, and he almost misses it, when the comic book Tony’s been carrying comes flying back over the banister, lands on the bench with a light thud. The blueprints are still inside it, and Steve picks it up again, goes to ask Tony what he wants Steve to do with it, only to be confronted by the door, already closed.

Instead, he opens the book again, sets the graphing paper aside and runs careful fingers over the garish cartoon images. Shuts his eyes, and tries very hard not to think about the Bucky that read these comics -- the one that was taken from him; the one that was his to take.

Steve pushes himself off of the bench. He takes the comic, and blueprint, with him.

* “JARVIS?”

Steve looks up at the elevator ceiling as soon as the doors close, sees himself in the mirror: shirt collar damp with sweat, towel around his shoulders, and the bags around his eyes are purpling, now, lack of sleep weighing in even on his stamina. In his pocket, his phone buzzes; he fumbles to pull it out, but is stopped by the AI’s response, the -- robot? cyborg? android? bucky would have known -- speaking all around the small metal chamber without creating an echo.

“Yes, Captain Rogers?” “Update on Sergeant Barnes.”  
“Captain Rogers, I don’t think it’s wise for you to be--” Steve’s stomach clenches a little tighter. “Update, JARVIS.”  
“Sergeant Barnes was last seen on the fifteenth floor three point six minutes ago. Currently I have no input on him--”

“Damn it.” Steve hits all of the buttons to the elevator, trying to stop it earlier. “Let me out of here, if he’s left the building I need to find him.”

“With all due respect, sir, the last known video footage of that particular guest room shows Sergeant Barnes activating what appears to be a satellite cloaking mechanism in the base of his shoulder before breaking into a ceiling duct.” Steve runs a frustrated hand through his hair but takes a breath and looks back up at the corner of the elevator, at the video camera there, because it’s the closest thing to the AI he can think to look in the eye. “If you’ll pardon my presumptuousness, I suspect your companion may be seeking autonomy. Might I suggest waiting at least a small period before attempting anything that Sergeant Barnes may view as an attempt at a recovery mission?”

Steve closes his eyes, letting the back of his head hit the steel wall. The product of Tony’s neural patterns or not, the AI is, frustratingly, on target. Steve isn’t meant to be Bucky’s warden; the Tower isn’t a prison. As badly as Steve wants to tear the building down to find him, it would be for his own desperation, not Bucky’s. Bucky hasn’t shown himself to be violent without provocation, dangerous in his own regard.

“Is there any way to know if he’s left the building?”

“Given Sergeant Barnes’ past behavior, I’m guessing such a problem to be most unlikely. In his current state he’s hardly equipped for stealth, even in Manhattan.”

Steve winces, but nods. He feels -- numb, skin-chilled, and he looks down at his hands, the tinge of blue in ashen pale, and he focuses on the way he can still see the colors, the way they’ve settled, now, the way he remembered them the first time: the world with the curtains drawn, instead of straining violent in his eyes. He startles when the elevator pings, releasing him onto his own floor without his having told it to do so..the AI, again, he guesses, and presumptuousness, he supposes, is a Stark trait. He can’t deny he wants anything but to disappear into exhaustion, though, and he nods to the ceiling awkwardly before he all but staggers into his own room, barely six am and exhausted again, bone-weary and miles from sleep, afraid in ways he hasn’t felt anymore since he lost Bucky, the first time.

On an afterthought, he digs out his phone, and glances at the text message before tossing it onto the bed. It’s from Natasha: u awake? everything ok?

Steve stares at it for a moment. He knows he’s supposed to tell her that he’s fine -- to buy Bucky...time, or whatever this is. But Natasha...

Steve hesitates before he texts back, scared as hell. Just doing it is terrifying; is admitting to something he can’t say out loud; is acknowledging he’s in over his head, that he doesn’t know how to help, or if he can.

His phone stays dark, so he strips and heads for a long, hot shower.

*

Steve steps out of the bathroom with a towel around his shoulders, another around his waist, for which he is almost immediately grateful. Natasha’s lounging on his bed, her phone in her hands, playing what looks very much to be like “Fruit Ninja” with a level of intensity generally reserved for real, living attackers. At the very least, real fruit.

“Natasha..what. What are you doing here?” Steve straightens the towel around his waist and moves for his dresser, pulling another pair of strangely uniform sweatpants from the collection Tony seems to have found. They’re plush and monochrome and exactly his size, and Steve’s half- surprised they aren’t monogrammed, to complete the effect.

“I spoke to Nick this morning,” she says, quietly, sliding her phone back in her pocket. When she looks up, there's a worry to her eyes that could almost be revealing; unnerved, he thinks with a dull kind of surprise, and he sits down on the bed across from her. “The department’s collapsing; anyone with the money to get out’s already gone to ground or severed ties, politically and financially. The media's calling it an International Watergate."

Steve hasn't been around all that long, yet, but it's been long enough to know the media is very fond of adding '-Gate' to anything. "So Fury doesn't know anything about that, then?" He raises an eyebrow, sarcasm catching in his tone.

"Coming from the guy who just let the Winter Soldier loose inside Stark's tower. Tell me who his last programmed target was, again?" She waves him off before he can say anything else. "SHIELD black-ops pulled him out of Volgograd in '94. The Russian government was in negotiation with a half-dozen private buyers at the time: the Latverian government; some intergalactic eccentric who calls himself the Collector. SHIELD planned on keeping him in the Fridge, figured putting him down was the humane option and they could preserve his DNA, extract traces of the serum." She shakes her head, curling her arms a little tighter around herself. "I didn't know, Steve." She's looking down at the comforter and Steve almost wishes that she  
weren't telling the truth. It's one of his least favorite things about the future, most days: the evil, the truly evil, can use enough money to make themselves disappear.

"I'm sorry," Steve says quietly. Natasha shakes her head.

"They could have been using him for years. There was an altercation in the late '90s--it was an internal job, an attempt on the Director. It wasn't long after Stark died, what if--" She cuts off, shakes her head. "The security data's all been destroyed. There's no record of access to either storage facility, or recording of pressure changes within the cryovac tank."

Steve sits back down on his own bed, letting his head hang. “SHIELD had a contract with one of Howard’s competitors, after he died. They wanted more of the tanks.”

“More sleepers,” Natasha corrects with a deep-set frown. “‘Volunteers,’ I’m sure. Special-ops missions. Serve and protect.” She looks at Steve, now, mouth quirking, dry. “Get some poor bastard to sign a couple of forms, Rogers, you’d be amazed what you can do to their head.”

Steve shivers, trying to imagine the kinds of people who would volunteer for that kind of  
opportunity. “Who would have had access to him,” he asks, voice firmer than he feels. “Who

could have given the order to thaw him?”

“Whoever it was, they’re long, long gone,” she draws out, letting her head drop back against the headboard. “We wouldn’t be able to touch them. Director Fury’s considering...alternate measures.”

“He’s going after them.” Natasha stares forward, blinking, and Steve adds without surprise, “you want to go with him.”

“Not if you need me to stay.”

The with you is left hanging in the space between them, and Steve knows this is the part where he says that he’s fine, but the words won’t come, catching on his tongue. Instead he just stares at the bed’s blue fabric, curling his fingers into it, tighter than he means to. There’s a slight dip of the bed and a lift as Natasha stands, coming to her feet in a single, smooth movement.

“You don’t have to decide right now, Steve. You’ve had a long night.” She looks around the penthouse, at the still-open window and the lack of a struggle. “What happened, with Barnes?”

Steve swings around to look at her, sitting on the edge of the bed. He, too, takes a moment to glance outside the window -- the sun’s fully up now, blinding and bright, but Steve doesn’t shut the black-out curtains, won’t even touch the blinds. He wants Bucky to be able to come back, when he’s ready. If he’s ready. He hopes Bucky will choose to do this on his own.

“I had a dream last night--I remembered something from back when we were kids. He didn’t...it threw him, I guess.” He leaves out the attack, the way Bucky’s forearm had pressed down on Steve’s windpipe, how hard he’d been in his sweatpants, pupils blown, panting with confusion. How Steve could have gotten off too like that, and how he hates himself for the way he knows he’ll be seeing Bucky’s face when he closes his eyes now, just like that, feeling the knife-edge of violence against his skin when he palms his own dick.

He can feel himself flush on the ghost of memory alone, and he startles, when Natasha reaches out, grabbing his collar firmly -- pulls, and reveals the still-dark bruising along his throat, the tell- tale press of metallic plates leaving markings in his skin.

“He didn’t mean it,” says Steve, pulling his shirt back up. “He was a million miles out, Nat.” “What did you remember?”  
Steve shakes his head. “It’s not the point. He’s not dangerous: he’s afraid. He’ll come back once he doesn’t think he’s being threatened.”

“And what if he thinks you’re the threat?”

He can’t, he wants to say, but the words won’t fit, get stuck in his throat before he can give them voice.

“He won’t.”

He’s left looking out the window, wondering if any part of him believes what he’s just said.

*

Steve isn’t sure, exactly, when Bucky comes back.

Once Natasha leaves, he curls in on himself in the center of the bed, still unmade and smelling of

familiar soap and unmistakable sweat. Closing his eyes is a tactical error.

Steve wakes up to sunlight still streaming orange through the blinds. The bedside clock reads just after ten, and he sits up, lifting the covers with him against the chill of the open window.

The open--

Steve’s shoved onto his back again before he has a chance to follow through with his thought, face to face with Bucky, blade pressed to his jugular. He presses back against the pillows, trying not to swallow, but it’s progress, he hopes, the spark of memory in his hold: the metal arm grips onto the headboard, this time, and Bucky’s the one breathing in harsh, sharp gasps.

Like before, Steve slowly brings his arm up, until his palm is resting over Bucky’s right hand, the one gripping his tremoring knife. Bucky’s pupils are blown and his nostrils flare, but he doesn’t move, keeping his grip on the hilt.

“Bucky…”

The blade pushes down, and Steve feels the warm seep of blood as it grazes skin just past too deep. “Shut up,” Bucky hisses, and he tosses the knife to the floor and clambers off of Steve, shoves a Stark Industries tablet onto his chest in the cool empty space where Bucky’s body had been. Off the bed, now, Bucky paces away from Steve, rounding and turning on him, knife still firm in his shaking hand. “You lied to me.”

Steve’s voice catches in his throat and he looks at Bucky, hesitant to stop, like he’ll run again, like he’ll vanish, disappear like he never existed. He pulls his eyes down to the tablet, though, sees the documents Bucky’s pulled up: a military-grade website that sells the grayscale goggles; a few papers on soulmates, only one in English; all of them on them, on Steve and Bucky, all of them reaching the same conclusion.

“You didn’t tell me what it meant. Even my fucking handlers told me what it meant.” Steve swallows. He isn’t so sure. “What...what did they say?”  
“Soulmates.” He says the word like it’s sour on his tongue. “They called it -- bound. There’s a part of your body that won’t...respond, that isn’t, that can’t reach peak performance. They told me it was a sickness. Used to use--lights, sometimes. Pain, try to bring it back.”

Seizures can cause chromatism, Steve thinks again, and wishes he could kill every person who's ever touched Bucky; every person who's ever let them.

“It’s not like that, Buck.” Steve sits up slowly, hands raised at his sides. “When it was good we used to be able to… You said you could always tell -- you were there, knew when I was gettin’ myself knocked around. ”

Bucky looks skeptical, but he doesn’t leave. He stares at Steve, worrying at the inside of his cheek, and Steve feels the weight of unsure eyes crawl across him, thinks of the way their landlady used to look at him, the suspicious weight of her gaze against the arm Bucky kept tucked around Steve’s waist in the winter, when the weather got cold and nothing they could do in public seemed to keep Steve warm.

Bucky’s eyes go wide, and Steve realizes he must have seen that, somehow. He remembers what memories were like when he saw his own from the other side of the looking glass; he tries to imagine seeing a version of himself he had no memory of existing, and shakes himself free, reaching out in apology.

“Bucky, I--”

Bucky rubs at his temples, waves Steve off. “Forget it, Steve, forget it okay? I’m gonna take the guest room tonight.” He’s already moving to the stairs. “It’s the easiest room to quarantine anyway; Stark’s schematics say the door’s reinforced.”

A part of Steve can’t shake the horror that comes with Bucky thinking of himself that way: like a weapon, like an armory; in terms of strength, and what it takes to subdue it. “Bucky, we’re not gonna…”

“Then don’t worry about it.” Bucky turns on his heel with a dismissive wave. “Gonna hit the gym.”

And Steve nearly stops him, follows to offer his company for a while, but he catches a glimpse of his own shirt as he moves -- the embroidered emblem on the shirt, the same on this as on every other piece of clothing supplied by the tower. Automatic; not even sent in by Stark Industries.

The SHIELD insignia; sharp lines in a jagged circle carefully stamped into his uniform, even when there is no uniform left.

Steve lets himself fall back on the bed, and lets Bucky leave, for the second time this morning.


	7. PURPLE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I get that it’s not the same, Buck. That you’re not the same. But you’re the one I want, not… I’m not closing my eyes and thinking about a ghost.” He chews his lip. “I didn’t love him more.”

Finding Bucky in the gym two hours after he leaves their room feels like a pyrrhic victory, if only in that he seems to be trying to work himself to ash. Bucky’s drenched in sweat by now, hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, breathing hard and clearly straining himself well past the point where his body has said stop. He has his left arm behind his back and he’s twisting on the parallel bars, swinging himself up and around using his flesh and blood arm, wincing when his shoulder catches the weight of his enhanced body.

It doesn’t stop him; he doesn’t even slow down. He hit the mat and is on the floor just as fast, coming up in a one-armed push up. Steve stands at the foot of the stairs, unsure what to do.

Bucky takes the question away from him. “I don’t remember it,” he says, voice tense with effort, body beginning to tremble. “Whoever you got in your head, it’s not me.”

Steve wants to counter him, tell him he knows -- he saw it; he keeps seeing it, the flashes of memory that scare Bucky badly enough to want them pushed down -- but he’s not in the business of doing what they did, of digging around inside Bucky’s brain. Instead, he sits down on the edge of the stairs, picking up the towel that hangs from the railing as he does. He doesn’t miss the splintering he caused himself just hours ago; he flushes in shame, and turns away, watching Bucky as he swears and drops to the mat, curling onto his side and clutching his right shoulder.

“You okay?” Steve tenses, but doesn’t move forward, yet.

“Fuck.” Bucky rolls onto his back. “Busted shoulder. Healed around a bullet back in… ‘68? ‘73? Hell. Handlers used to-- Remember they talked about replacing the whole thing. Never figured out what the hell they meant. Coulda been the joint, coulda just been…” He sits up and rolls his left shoulder, flexes the plates of the arm. Steve bites the inside of his mouth to stave off the wince.

“Stark could look at it. He’s not a medical doctor, but he could scan it. Get an idea. He’s got a team, took a--life support, artificial heart out of his chest last year. Pretty sure they could handle a shoulder.”

Bucky snorts. “Thanks, but no. Rather keep my own shitty parts then wake up with another horror show.”

“Bucky…” The distance feels strange, off-center between them; Steve had forgotten what it was like, to have Bucky with him, fights the urge to close the space that doesn’t feel natural. He wonders if it’s just memory or that thing they’ve always had tugging between them; wonders if Bucky feels any of it, too. “I’m sorry,” he says finally, clasping his hands and looking down at his thumbs. “I should have told you. I was afraid of how you’d react, that you’d want to leave.”

It seems so much worse out loud, his voice all the more desperate, pathetic to his own ears. When he looks up though, Bucky’s still watching him, and there’s nothing like derision in the expression on his face. He looks...lost, wiped away like a slate, and it’s somehow, even worse. It’s a long, stretched-out second before the glaze clears, and he shakes his head, like he’s pushing out a memory. There’s nothing there for Steve to latch onto though, and his vision blurs, goes dull for just a moment -- enough to make his heart jump, heavy in his chest.

The world rights itself, and Bucky still looks lost, but the redirect is deliberate when he asks instead, rubbing his shoulder: “Stark? Like that...that other one, the--” His face contorts in frustration.

“Howard. Yeah. Tony Stark, his son, he’s letting us stay here. He’s my...friend.” It feels odd to say, but Steve supposes it’s true enough. “Iron Man.”

The last one seems to register; Bucky frowns and stands, and Steve follows him up. “Yeah. Rather not.” He grabs the towel from Steve with his left hand and winces, looks down at his hand opens and closes his palm, frowning at an apparent stiffness in the joints of his knuckles.

Steve hesitates, watching Bucky scowl. “How often did they look at it,” he asks finally, quiet. Bucky shrugs.

“Wasn’t usually awake. Doesn’t matter, it’ll loosen up. Just sorta…” He does it again, winces this time.

“Does it hurt?”

“Can’t feel it at all mostly. Just catches sometimes.” He dries his face and neck, wraps the towel around his neck. “Forget about it, Rogers.”

Steve frowns, but he’s stopped from saying anything else by the door opening again, by Natasha, Bruce and Thor entering the gymnasium. As soon as she sees Bucky, Natasha’s eyes dart between he and Bruce, eyebrows raised; Steve shakes his head, moving from the stairs to the nearby bench to let them pass by.

“It’s okay, Nat, we were just heading out.”

Bucky’s mouth tightens into a line; he looks warily at Bruce and Thor, the two faces he hasn’t seen before, doesn’t recognize within the tower. In another life, Steve’s familiarity would have been enough. In this one, Bucky’s tense despite Steve’s careful calm, the plates of his arm pressurizing and calibrating into a fighting stance.

Natasha puts her hand on Bruce’s shoulder. Thor smiles broadly, friendly on instinct, and sets Mjolnir down on the mat long enough to raise his hands in a show of surrender.

“I am afraid we may have startled your companion, Captain. I was told before I came here, that this might be the case.” He takes a step forward. “I have heard of you, friend,” he says, addressing Bucky directly. “I’ve been told you are a brave warrior.”

Bucky snorts, but something in him seems to uncoil, and Steve can feel the air in the room clear, watches Natasha’s body language shift out of the corner of his eye. “Whoever told you that’s a fucking liar,” says Bucky, throwing his towel onto the bench beside Steve. “Gun with a pulse.”

Thor tips his head, but says nothing else, offering a small but no less genuine smile and stretching, twisting his body back and forth. He’s wearing a pair of the Tower’s apparently standard-issue sweatpants and nothing else, and Steve finds himself staring without meaning to, can’t help the

small grin he gets when he realizes Bucky is, too. “Well then, since you are here.” Thor rocks on the balls of his feet, formidable, even at his least threatening. “Let us see the value of this weapon. Care to spar, my friend?”

Steve sees Natasha tense, again; he feels his own body wind tight, watching Bucky for… anything, any sign that he’s taken Thor as a threat. He’s surprised, and then ashamed for it, when Bucky just looks Thor up and down, the corner of his mouth curling into something predatory, more than a little amused. Aroused, in another life, Steve thinks off-handed. He isn’t quite sure what to call it in this one. Feral.

“Dunno,” he drawls. “Think they’re gonna let me?"

He’s looking at Natasha, but it’s Steve that Thor fixes on when he says, assuring, “he cannot hurt me.”

Steve glances at Natasha, who shrugs, leaning with Bruce against the balcony railing. Bucky watches both of them, then turns back to Thor.

“Sorta sounds like a challenge, big guy.” His arm whirrs, shifting serpentine in fluorescent light. “Name’s James. It’s about all I got.”

“Ah, James, then.” Thor claps Bucky’s left shoulder briefly, then moves to the mat. “If you are indeed the Captain’s kindred spirit, I do not doubt you have a good deal more than that.”

*

Bucky is beautiful. Bucky is terrifying.  
Steve wonders if this was a mistake.

As soon as he hit the mat, all of Bucky’s jagged-glass edges went hot and turned molten, fluid and seamless and impossible not to burn as he paces the edge of the sparring ring, eyeing Thor like a well-trained predator. They’re as evenly-matched as they’re likely to be: Thor has Mjolnir, but Bucky’s dodged any attempt to use it to pin him, knocking Thor’s feet from under him and pressing his elbow to Thor’s chest in a move that would likely break a normal man’s rib cage. Thor just laughs and throws his weight forward, and Bucky twists, lands on all fours, crouched like a wild cat.

Steve swallows. Watching from beside him on the bench, Bruce touches his forearm. Natasha, for her part, is cross-legged on the floor; to anyone else, she’d look at ease. Steve knows better, though, knows she has her hands clasped because she’s holding her gauntlets’ triggering mechanism.

It happens too quickly to get a real read on -- even Natasha pulls up short. Bucky comes out of his crouch low and hits dirty, going for Thor’s knees and using his own weight to topple him. The force throws the hammer from his hand, and Bucky pins him with his left arm against his neck, not pressing down, but the plates clicking solid, hair askew and eyes wide and lethal as he looks down at Thor.

“Game.”

Thor laughs and reaches out; there’s a crackle of static that makes the room smell like ozone, and the hammer is back in his grip again, electricity sizzling as he takes it in hand. It’s barely a spark, but Bucky still jumps, leaping off of him and the mat and nearly tripping as he pushes himself

against the wall.

Steve’s off the bench and next to him in a second. “Bucky?”

“Fucking…” He leans into Steve, clutching his shirt on instinct, and suddenly the room’s gone too bright again, the lights hot against his eyes and the silver of Bucky’s arm blinding, bleeding against the red on his shoulder.

\--always half-hoped Steve would get his head on right when he left, would find a girl who saw how damn good he was and get engaged, get married, have towheaded gap-toothed damn skinny babies and Bucky thought he saw it sometimes, strapped to the table, thought he could handle  
dying and maybe even what came after if it took him out of it, gave Steve a chance at some kind of a life…

And then the little damn fool idiot is a huge damn fool idiot and Bucky’s gut burns inside in a way that isn’t the alcohol, when he sees how Agent Carter looks at Steve, the way Steve gets shy like he wants to look back. Thinks this is hell, not some slimy bastard with a couple of needles, because Bucky was supposed to have died on that table, and now he’s here when Steve doesn’t need him anymore, shot full of mortar shells and hasn’t hit the ground yet--

Bucky gasps and sits up and his face is red, cheeks wet with tears. Steve lets him go hesitantly and realizes belatedly he’s fighting it, too, wipes at his eyes, shaking the refracted memory away.

Bucky scrambles to his feet, looking down at Steve in something like horror. Nearby, Thor has come back to wrap a new towel around Bucky’s shoulders apologetically. Mjolnir is hanging from a gym hook a ways away.

“I am truly sorry my friend. I should have warned you of Mjolnir’s power.”

Bucky shakes his head. “Didn’t know...wasn’t expecting it, is all. I’m gonna.” He heads to the stairs, still shivering, and Steve resists the urge to follow.

The door shuts with a solid, resounding echo and Steve drops his head between his knees, and tries to remember to breathe. He remembers someone telling him to do this, once, a hand on his back, gently coaxing. Bucky he guesses, and the thought makes him feel worse.  
“Steve…” That’s Natasha, and he feels her hand squeeze his hand carefully. “He’ll get better.” “That’s why Bruce is here, right? Because you expected progress.” Steve doesn’t have to look at  
either of them to know they both look caught in their tracks. He’s right; Natasha would never put  
Bruce in a situation like this unless she thought there was a chance they would need the Hulk. “Steve--”  
He shakes his head; his jaw tenses, and releases, and the backs of his teeth seem to hurt with the pressure. “Not right now.”

He hears a quiet exhale, and then Natasha’s hand is sliding away from his. Footsteps retreat up the stairs, and the door shuts quietly, leaving him sitting on the bench, curled forward and eyes closed. He assumes he’s alone in the gym now until he hears the heavy metallic scrape of Mjolnir being lifted, and looks up to see Thor, having found his shirt again, standing in front of him. He looks concerned.

“You’re worried about your companion, Captain. That he will not return to you?”

Steve rubs his eyes. “I’m afraid there isn’t any of ‘him’ left to come back.” He tips his head

backward, knocking his skull gently against the wall. “What do I do if he doesn’t want to remember?”

“There are many ways for a soldier to be wounded.” Thor touches the edge of his hammer, expression pained. “Many do not come home the way they left. But wounds heal. With time.”

Steve laughs, dry and cracked in his throat. “‘Afraid we don’t last as long as you. At the rate we’re going, we might not get that much time.”

Thor narrows his eyes, looking at him thoughtfully. “Heimdall has seen otherwise, my friend. And he has knowledge of all the nine realms. You and your James Barnes, you share sight, do you not?”

“The chromatism? Sure, but I thought Asgard had--”

“Memories. Visions. Very few manifest such a connection, Captain, even on Asgard. You have a gift, this shared being. You must value it. It can help him.”  
Steve sighs. “Hasn’t been a hell of a lot of help so far. Sent him through a window this morning.” “It is a process. Natasha was not wrong in that.” He leans in, reaching out a hand to Steve.  
“Come, Captain. Let us join our brethren, and your James.”

Mine, Steve thinks, barely biting back a crack of laughter that feels a lot like tearing, and wishes it were, that he’d finally split in two. But he reaches out anyway, because Bucky needs him to be the firm one, still, and he lets Thor pull him upwards, unsteady on his feet.

*

True to word, Bucky moves to the guest room that night. Steve tries not to take it like loss, like permanence: he watches Bucky sit at the end of an impossibly tight-cornered bed, holding an e- cigarette between his fingers because the Tower’s smoke detectors are wired against the real ones, twisting it back and forth in gunmetal fingers and staring at the black accent wall in front of him, expression blank and eyes empty. He looks hollow, and Steve has no idea what to do.

He stands in the doorway, feeling too-big in this body, and waits it out.

“They don’t mean anything,” says Bucky, eventually, still fixed on the wall. “What’s real, what isn’t, it all feels the same.”

Steve tenses but doesn’t move, waiting until he’s given permission before he moves any closer. “What about with Thor this morning? You remembered feeling--”

“That wasn’t me,” Bucky snaps, voice brittle. He’s looking down at his left hand again, watching the light on the vape go blue as he presses and releases the button on its side, and Steve nods carefully because there’s nothing else he knows how to do.

“Okay, Buck.” Steve leans against the molding. “Can I come in anyway?”

Bucky gestures and Steve comes to sit on the corner of the bed across from him, unsure, suddenly, what to do with his body.

“You can’t be this desperate,” Bucky spits out, still staring at his gleaming prosthesis. His eyes slide to Steve’s, and it hurts, the sharp cut of pain behind all the resignation. “You look at me and see one fucking thing same as that poor bastard?”

Steve knows it’s a blow that’s meant to wound -- but this, he doesn’t question, and he reaches over and takes the e-cigarette from Bucky, presses down and inhales heavy, sweet-slicked vapor. The exhale holds in the room between them and Bucky watches, eyes going wide and mouth twitching against the clear instinct to speak. Steve lifts the cartridge again, and Bucky snatches it away, movement fast enough to surprise the both of them. When Steve looks over, Bucky’s staring down at the cigarette in his hand, glancing between it and Steve and looking thoroughly shaken.

“You shouldn’t be, you used to have…” Bucky crushes the cartridge in his palm and shakes his head, almost violent. “No.”

“It’s okay Bucky, I just forgot,” Steve says quietly, fighting down the urge to say something else. “When we were kids I had asthma, a weak heart. Sometimes I’d get stuck in bed when the weather changed, chest hurt too bad to walk.” He fights down the urge to say more, though, and instead he pushes himself back off the bed, swaying only slightly this time as he rises. He turns to Bucky, smiling a little sadly, and thinks about how this shouldn’t have happened, how Bucky doesn’t belong here. He could’ve gone home, after Zola, Steve knows now; was conscripted, not enlisted, never signed up to be a body shield and a hand-grenade, a casualty of war as a  
mechanized Prometheus, reliving his own worst nightmare every time they decided he was needed again.

Bucky was only there for Steve; to protect him from the choices he made before he understood just how much he was risking. It should never have happened; Bucky should never have been on that train, should never have been in Europe again at all. He should’ve gone home, gotten married  
\-- had kids, gotten old. Another smiling, aged face in a yellowed family picture book; grandchildren with faces that echo like ghosts.

Before, Steve would have wanted all of this for Bucky, would’ve given anything to have woken up to something more left behind than photos of him, still too young, and an empty grave. Now it claws at the base of his spine, a part of him that thinks the rest of it might be worth it, if it means he has the chance to have him, now.

To covet is a deadly sin. And Steve would never say it, because he’s Captain America and it’s his job to stay the same, but looking at Bucky now, vicious and helpless and unequivocally deadly, he thinks, maybe they’ve always been meant to change for each other.

*

Steve lies awake that night in a bed that’s too big, listening to the silence howling through the penthouse. Before, he and Bucky shared an apartment: could hear everything, with the walls so thin, a constant din of noise that kept Steve feeling safe, warm and accounted for and something like loved even when the sound was just Bucky swearing over the soup pot. The acoustics in the tower keep the building deathly silent, and Bucky himself is an absence of sound -- all stealth and whisper, careless silence like something impermanent.

Steve rolls onto his side, and watches the reflection of skyline lights out the window. He tries to remember the din of the city, the rattle of the neighbors from their old apartment.

He falls asleep to the memory of Bucky’s breathing, not quite snoring and pressed against his neck, and the weight of his arm wrapped around Steve’s waist. The colors behind his eyes dip and twist in foggy light, and Steve wonders if Bucky is seeing it, too.

*

The whistle of a train -- Steve remembers this, he knows -- the air, the sudden shock of cold and

the screaming, the numb impossible feeling of the entire world collapsing. Time and his own memory have scrubbed the details from those agonizing seconds, and what’s left is a vicious blur of screaming color, the blinding, helpless horror and the moment Steve had thought about letting go, too--

The images are so static-scraped and jumbled that he doesn’t realize when the scene changes, when it isn’t his own eyes he’s looking through anymore.

The numbing bite of cold protects him at first, but while they strap him down, they don’t sedate him, and he screams as the bone saw whirs and gnaws at his side until they shove a leather strap in his mouth, bites down hard enough that it’s pulled out with marks clean through it. A needle pierces his neck only once they’ve finished, and he wakes to a bandage where his left arm used to be, to a buzzing in his skull and images--pictures that can’t mean anything. He fuzzily remembers being told to recite his own name and number (what numbers?) but when he opens his mouth there’s no name on his tongue.

He sees scared blue eyes and hair the color of straw and he curls in on himself and wonders why death is taking so long--

It wasn’t until London and three days later that Steve realized...that Steve knew. Cold gray February in Austria and everything was washed in a muted dull pallet, and Steve with his head pressed into his hands, counting his breaths and answering questions in nods and gestures, because he was out of tears and everything else hurt.

Peggy’s been briefed when she meets them at the landing strip; she must be, from the way she looks at Steve, from the way no one says a word at the missing officer, at the thickening silence.

Steve’s sure she’s been briefed, but there’s no way to prepare for the panic in his eyes, the way he staggers backwards and collapses onto the mud and grass, how Dugan and Jones have to support him. The way he can’t tell them what’s wrong no matter how often they ask, because his breath is coming out in helpless little catches and he’s shaking his head, fighting back sobs.

Peggy’s lipstick isn’t red anymore, but it isn’t gray, either, and the tinge of faded color as he stares at it peels at his eyes, terrifying and damning.

Steve shoots awake -- or tries to, jerking up only to find himself already gripped in mismatched arms, the cool metal of Bucky’s left hand rubbing awkward circles across Steve’s chest. His expression is curious, at himself mostly, like he isn’t quite sure how or why he’s decided to do this  
\-- but it’s body memory, or has to be, the way his thumb rubs along Steve’s sternum until he sighs and leans forward, panic uncoiling around his chest. When he’s calmed down enough to register self-consciousness, he realizes he has a vice-grip on Bucky’s right hand, holding on hard enough that it has to hurt. He’s twisted their fingers together like he’s afraid Bucky will disappear if he lets go, and it only takes him a second, still a beat too long, to put action to memory.

“Oh.” He pulls his hand away -- attempts to, at least; Bucky squeezes back, and holds him where he is, listing sideways into Bucky’s chest, with his hand in Bucky’s and Bucky’s fingers tracing his abdomen. “I’m sorry, Buck. It’s just a nightmare, I get them sometimes.”

“Not the only one having ‘em.” He presses his forehead to Steve’s neck. “I don’t-- I didn’t remember. Stevie.” Steve feels him squeeze his eyes shut, pressed tight to Steve’s bare skin. “Why’s this keep happening?” He grimaces. “Fucking bright light.”

It’s still close to dark in the room around them, the purple tendrils of a barest sunrise just beginning to shade the floor and walls in deep, heavy purples. Draped across Bucky’s skin, it covers him in ghosting bruises, and Steve takes his hand a little tighter and uses the other to pull him in, letting

him bury his face in Steve’s neck until even muted colors stop crashing down on top of him.

“It’s been a long time,” Steve says quietly, suppressing the shiver as Bucky’s left hand slides across his stomach and along his side, scraping skin in even whorls of cool metal plating. “You gotta let yourself adjust.” He turns to kiss the top of Bucky’s head, smiling into his hair where he knows Bucky can’t see it. “I was scared to hell the first time, hid it from ma for a couple of months. She didn’t ask ‘til we were older but I always figured she knew…”

“How old--” Bucky’s voice is hoarse, and he coughs, tries again. “How old were you?”

Steve doesn’t miss the flutter in Bucky’s throat, the hesitation as he words his question without including himself. “Seven,” he says with a rueful smile. “You were nine. Talked my way into pissing off a couple guys twice as big as I was.”

“Everything was red,” Bucky murmurs. “Your mouth was all split up.”

Steve rubs the base of Bucky’s neck carefully, feeling the strange twist of metal, the heavy reinforcements holding biotech to bone. Slides his fingers just to the side and presses in, and he’s rewarded when Bucky groans, in relief this time, and leans his weight more heavily against him. “You could quit your day job, Rogers.”

“Mmm.” Steve slides the heel of his palm up a particularly hard knot and Bucky gasps, squirming. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

They stay like that for a while: Steve pressing firmly, gently into Bucky’s flesh; Bucky squeezing their intertwined fingers, right hand digging fingerprints into the muscle-stretched skin of his side. Familiar, mirror-image: Steve can remember a dozen, hundred times like this with Bucky on his old bed, falling asleep on the couch waiting for him to get home from work, waking up to find Bucky half-under him, arms hauled around him in a comfortable vice. Safe; wishing Bucky felt like that now. He smiles, lopsided, at the noise Bucky makes into Steve’s skin: soft and whining, pushing in closer. He’s pressed himself against Steve’s hip and Steve can feel the flesh between his legs beginning to swell: nowhere near an erection, but interest, all the same, proof that Bucky is here with him, isn’t lost to the labyrinth in his head. When he finally tips his face up, lazy, his eyes are hooded and his expression is familiar, enough that Steve’s breath catches, even as Bucky’s hand brushes across his jaw.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to lean down, to catch Bucky’s mouth with his own and kiss him, soft and careful like it’s their first time all over again. It doesn’t feel all that different, Steve thinks: there’s still dim purple light coming through the window, casting shadows across Bucky’s face and making him look wide-eyed and far more vulnerable than he is. And Steve is bigger now, they both are, really, but he still feels all of fourteen as Bucky coaxes his mouth open, laves his upper lip and makes him groan. Falling back against the mattress again is like breathing -- rolling Bucky over, because he’d always done it that way, because when they were kids Bucky  
had always been afraid of getting too heavy on him, of pulling the air out of his lungs or setting his heart irregular. Now it tangles their legs and Steve laughs and mouths at Bucky’s neck, sucking dark splotches into the skin at the base of his throat.

“Fuck,” Bucky sighs, tipping his head up to give Steve better access. His left hand, cool metal, slides up to hold the nape of Steve’s neck, fingers digging in like Steve’s got his mouth somewhere else, and Steve can’t help himself, presses his tongue down along the line of Bucky’s throat and listens to him gasp, feels him writhe beneath him. Not so much has changed at all, Steve thinks: Bucky’s legs fall open easy, hitching around Steve’s hips, and he rocks up against Steve’s thigh, still only half-hard but desperate with want.

“God. Stevie.” His hand slides from Steve’s neck to brush at his hair -- shorter now, but Bucky

still catches wisps of the bangs around his fingers -- and leans up again, kissing Steve like he can’t quite help it. When he pulls back its with a wry smile, and he lets himself fall back against the mattress. “This isn’t a good idea right now.”

Steve shivers at the childhood nickname, because he knows it never made it to any history books, pushes off of Bucky and sits up, giving him a wide berth of space. Too wide, apparently, because Bucky grabs his forearm and laughs, self deprecating, other hand coming up to rub at his face. “It’s not--fuck, it’s not that I don’t want to.” He drops back against the pillows. “I’m still not the guy you wanna be doing this with.” He reaches up and touches Steve’s face. “Not gonna watch you try not to wonder what the hell you were thinking.”

Steve opens his mouth in protest, but Bucky reaches for him before he can say anything, pulling him back down, head against his shoulder. From this angle, Steve can feel the hard metal where the rest of Bucky's collar should be, the way it spreads out in an uneven plate of bone and metal, vivisecting his sternum where the reinforcements end. Steve scrapes his fingers along the fault line and Bucky shudders, looks up at the ceiling with big, blacked-out eyes.

“You know, I don’t make a habit of doing this with people I don’t care about,” Steve says quietly. He fumbles until he finds Bucky’s hand, can lace their fingers together. It feels a little ridiculous, stripping himself raw and getting silence in response, but Steve swallows and keeps going, nerves like he’s still a kid, the first time all over again. “I get that it’s not the same, Buck. That you’re not the same. But you’re the one I want, not… I’m not closing my eyes and thinking about a ghost.” He chews his lip. “I didn’t love him more.”

And he gets silence, in response. Quiet, for a long, horrific moment where he’s sure Bucky is going to get up and leave, before he feels flesh and blood fingers find his in the dark, Bucky crossing his own chest to twine their hands together.

It takes time, but he falls asleep, that way, listening to Bucky’s breathing and the reverberation of his heartbeat underneath metal-fuse-and-bone.

*

Steve wakes up to sunlight, red and barely over the skyline, just barely cracking through the curtains. At some point in the night he’d rolled onto his back and now he’s got Bucky pressed against him, mouth open and breathing damp air on his skin, air wheezing in the echo of a barely- there snore that Steve used to give him hell over when they had their own place, spent every night curled like questions.

Sitting at the foot of the bed, dressed in her tactical uniform and fidgeting with an electric charge, is Natasha.

Steve glances down at himself on instinct, earning a snort.

“Seen it, Rogers, they brought me in when they had you in the labs. Not bad, by the way.”

Steve hopes his expression says disapproving, because he’s sure the flush he feels across his chest is working its way up his neck.

“What are you--what time is it?” Steve looks around, trying to see the clock without jostling Bucky.

“Little after five. I wanted to apologize for yesterday, for Banner.” She closes her eyes, briefly, something like wetness on her lashes, just for a moment, from this angle. “I had to be sure. I couldn’t risk-- I needed to know that you’re safe with him here.” A pause, nearly hesitation. “I

talked to Fury again. He didn’t tell you because he didn’t think there was anything left of Barnes to bring back. When SHIELD first brought him out of the Fridge they called in Stephen Strange, Reed Richards. Even Banner, before his accident, anyone SHIELD had any kind of connection with. None of them knew who he was but they all tried-- They wanted to help him.”

Steve looks down at Bucky, eyes still closed and twitching with sleep, and swallows down his anger. “So why isn’t Nick the one telling me this, then?”

“It wasn’t about you,” she says, words dagger-pointed. “The American--Barnes. What they did to him… It was punishment, at first. For me. Because of me.” She looks shaken, and Steve thinks of the Bucky he knew, before, the one, made hard by fire wrapped around him now. Can’t imagine a version that would take back where Natasha is, now.

And he doesn’t need her to finish, to know where this is going. He takes in the uniform, the time of day and the conversation, careful but awkward above Bucky’s sleeping form. Natasha doesn’t have time to get him alone.

“You’re going with him, aren’t you. Fury?”

She doesn’t have to answer. Steve reaches out and takes her hand with his free one.

“I didn’t want to leave without telling you.” She smiles at Bucky, maybe something a little sad in her expression, and looks back at Steve. “Be careful, Steve. Take care of yourself.” Reaches out and touches the hair obscuring Bucky’s face. “For both of you.”

She’s gone before he can work out anything else to say, brushing a kiss across his forehead and running a hand through his hair one more time on her way out. The door shuts quietly, and Bucky sniffles, turning his head into Steve’s chest, but somehow, stays asleep.

Steve stares at the ceiling and holds him tighter.

*

The good days come more often, with time. He still gets quiet, still keeps his things in Steve’s guest bedroom, but he rarely spends the whole night there, crawls into Steve’s bed when he thinks he’s asleep and curls up on the opposite end of the mattress, just close enough that Steve can feel the dip of the bed underneath him, smell his own shampoo, the clean sharp scent of his soap because Bucky doesn’t see any reason to use anything but whatever he finds in their now-shared bathroom. Some nights, Steve knows, Bucky doesn’t sleep at all, inches towards Steve like he wants to touch, and it takes everything not to open his eyes and reach out, to let Bucky leave before sunrise each time, to greet him the next morning with dark circles beneath his eyes and pretend nothing’s wrong, that he doesn’t know how hard Bucky’s working to avoid the dreams, the memories and the echo of the man that comes with them.

The man he swears, sharp and scared and ice in his eyes, that he isn’t, anymore.

Steve takes his hand beneath the breakfast table and doesn’t say a word when he gets a brief flash of warm light and the smell of dust and street exhaust, sees himself, smaller, across the table with both hands clasped between Bucky’s. It’s gone as fast as it appeared and Bucky’s shaking his head, now, looking at Steve like he expects a comment.

Steve says nothing, and hands Clint Bucky’s plate for the first stack of pancakes.

They leave the tower more often, and that part is a surprise, though perhaps it shouldn’t be: Bucky is comfortable, in the din of a crowd, a mass of heartbeats like breaths between a crosshair, a sea of faces where his disappears. It’s harder, for Steve: he sees his own face on a billboard

advertising a traveling exhibit at the Historical Society this month, a black-and-white photo of himself in boot-camp; another, in color, of Bucky, in profile from his own sketchbook.

A Light Left On In Brooklyn: Captain America’s Notebooks, A Traveling Exhibition  
January 30-March 30

Steve winces; when he looks over, Bucky’s eyes are fixed on the same billboard. Steve watches him, wary.

“Steve,” he asks finally. “What was in those notebooks?” He touches Steve’s wrist, and Steve gets a sudden shuddering wave of nerves, the blurred memory of himself, hunched over a pad of  
paper, pink tongue pressed to the edge of his mouth in concentration as he chooses another pastel. From the bed, Bucky takes a long drag from a cigarette and lets the smoke curl around him, turns his head for a better view and arches his back, stretching.

”Don’t move, you’re mucking it up,” Steve complains, no real bite to his words. He’s barely looking up, apparently focused on the wisps of white smoke, now, and Bucky chuckles and plays with the sheets on their mussed bed.

“Ain’t I supposed to be artfully draped or something? You gettin’ into blue pics, now?” Steve snorts. “Like anyone’s gonna pay for it from you--hold still, I gotta--”  
And Steve pulls his hand away, ducking his head. “No, it’s not like--jeez, Buck, it’s for kids.”  
Howard tore most of the most damning stuff out, besides -- Tony has them, somewhere, in a box  
in the mansion he refuses to visit, but Steve supposes that part can wait for later. Now, he waits for the part where Bucky denies the memory, pretends he has no idea what Steve’s talking about. It doesn’t come, though, and Steve can’t help his surprise when Bucky just takes his hand, again,  
and pulls him past the billboard and into the subway tunnel.

*

Steve doesn’t notice the photographers until Tony drops a magazine into his lap: a surprisingly clear photo of him and Bucky, taken at the MOMA, at an exhibit on futurism Steve had wanted to see and Bucky had been bored enough to bother to humor. With his cap down and his collar up Bucky isn’t much more than a vague profile, but Steve’s arm is around his waist, and he’s whispering something in Bucky’s ear, and the smile on his face is soft and smitten, damning on its own. The glossy copy comes equipped with its own tacky headline, and Steve pinches the bridge of his nose as he stares down at the yellow text: Captain America in Color! Could a new paramour be on the horizon?

He brings the magazine to bed, that night, rolled between his hands and held like supplication, eyes cast down at the comforter, at the rise of Bucky’s feet where he’s already crawled in. Given up the ghost of the guest-room entirely, and Steve takes a breath and hopes this doesn’t send him right back across the hallway. He waits until Bucky looks up at him, setting down a book Steve can’t help but notice is a biography on the Howling Commandos, and then sits on his own side of the bed, unrolling the glossy print and setting it on the bed between them.

“I didn’t know anyone was watching us,” he says, quiet. “I’m sorry, Buck.”

Bucky stares down at the magazine, reaches out with his left hand to trace the letters of the copy. “Do they know who you’re with?”

Steve shakes his head. “No clue.”

“Any response?”

A shrug. “Tony said a couple of calls, just tabloids. Doesn’t seem like it’s getting a lot of attention.”

Bucky’s eyes stay fixed on the headline for another, long moment, before he picks it up, lets it drop onto the nightstand. “Then who cares?”

“Bucky, you know eventually they’re gonna--”

“Yeah, and we’ll deal with it then.” He picks his book back up. “Give Stark enough time to come up with an excuse for why you’re dating a dead guy.”

And Steve almost opens his mouth to correct him, because Tony has someone on payroll for that, is pretty sure Tony has someone for everything...but Bucky just let himself admit to this, between them, came as close as he has so far to acknowledging his own reality. So instead, Steve says nothing, and climbs under the covers, rolling onto his side and bracing himself on his elbow.

Bucky looks back up from his book. “Why are you asking? Does it--are you okay?”

Steve reaches out and brushes Bucky’s hair back, tucking a too-long strand of it behind his ear. “Yeah, Buck--yeah, I’m fine. More than fine. I just…”

He leans in, slow enough to give Bucky time to move away, to back up or push him off or get up and leave, if that’s what he wants. But Bucky stays still, eyes lowered to Steve’s mouth, and his own lips part, mouth opening under Steve’s as he kisses him for the first time since that night they’d both been too overwhelmed by nightmares to think about this straight.

This time, there’s no pressure to the kiss -- because Steve’s exhausted, but more than that, because he’s scared to death: of screwing this up, of chasing Bucy away. He cradles Bucky’s head in his hand and kisses him carefully, lingering against the corners of his mouth and gently scraping his lips with his teeth. When he pulls away they’re both breathing hard, eyes wide and staring, unsure what to do.

It’s Steve that breaks the silence first, touching Bucky’s cheek and smiling, shaky, around the thudding in his chest. “I can sleep in the other room if you want, it’s not, I wasn’t trying to--”

“I swear to god I’ll break your legs if you even think about it.” Bucky sets his book on the table, covering the garish headline, and pushes Steve down onto the pillows. “Just...sleep, tonight, yeah?” He laughs a little, self-effacing. “I’m still…”

Steve reaches out and pulls Bucky in, adjusts until they’re both comfortable, Bucky’s head on his shoulder and his left arm wrapped around Steve’s chest, grip tight enough that he’ll have finger- shaped bruises in the hollows of his ribs when he wakes up tomorrow. “Yeah, yeah, of course.” Tucks his chin over Bucky’s forehead, and closes his eyes. “Whatever you need, Bucky. Always.”

*

Steve can't leave him, after Azzano.

“You can’t breathe down my neck forever.” It’s said mildly, but honestly, and Bucky laces his boots in their shared barracks, he lets his foot drop to the dirt floor and leans back on his palms, looking up at Steve from his army-issue cot. It creaks slightly, folding under his weight, and Bucky smirks, as if somehow its failure proves a point. “Make a shitty sniper.”

“I’m not…” Steve doesn’t even bother trying. “It was gone, Buck.” He tells the truth, instead, and Bucky’s face goes serious at the way Steve’s hands shake. “The--all the colors kept coming in and out. They were getting lighter and Phillips said they weren’t going back in for you.” He sits down on the cot beside him; it groans in warning protest.

“Christ, you’re an idiot, Rogers.” Bucky scowls, but he pulls him in, kissing him, wet and hot and pushing against his mouth, demanding he open for him the way he always has. It makes something inside Steve growl, and twist, and he gets his fingers in Bucky’s hair and takes control of the kiss, tongue against Bucky’s and sucking on his lip every time he pulls away, short separations that make Bucky whine.

Beneath them, the cot makes a dangerous sound. Bucky drops his forehead to Steve’s shoulder and groans.

“Fuckin’ cockblockin’ Uncle Sam.” Bucky leans back, and then nearly falls over when Steve slides in front of him, pulls his knees apart and reaches for his pants. “Jesus, Steve. Stevie…”

“Stay quiet,” Steve instructs, and then Bucky is choking on his own breath, and Steve is feeling the refracted shivers down his own spine and tug in his chest as he takes down Bucky’s cock, hand around the base and pushing up with his tongue rhythmically, every trick he’s ever used before, except now, when Bucky squirms, he can hold him down, fingers in the dips of his hipbones as he comes, all shock, breath hitching--

Steve wakes up with a gasp, but he doesn’t move, stays frozen where he is -- waits for any movement from Bucky, any sign he’s woken him up, too. But Bucky’s silent beside him, and Steve breathes, and closes his eyes, but he swears he can still taste Bucky in his throat, is rock hard in his pajamas, leaking against the flap. His thighs tremble, he’s so close, and Steve pushes his hand into his boxers, bites his lip so he doesn’t make any noise as he jerks himself off.

He’s close, god, close when he feels Bucky curl around him. The movement has him letting go, and Bucky groans and bites down on his neck, lazy, rolls his hips against Steve’s ass. He’s only half-hard, but then, he hasn’t been doing anything but listening.

“Not gonna let me in on the show?”

Steve shivers, and slides his hand back down.

He takes his time, this time around, thumb catching his foreskin, pulling, head wet enough to make the friction pleasurable. He squeezes, and groans, and feels Bucky’s hand move: he grips Steve’s boxers, and works them down, just until Steve’s cock is free, until he can see Steve’s hand, working himself over. “Gorgeous, baby,” he whispers, and Steve shudders because Bucky hasn’t called him that in seventy years. Bucky hums into his ear, “you’re doing so perfect,” and  
Steve gasps, hand moving faster. He groans, and wishes for--a toy, something inside of him, fuck-  
\--but then Bucky slides his thigh between Steve’s, pressing up against his balls and asshole and rubbing, just friction enough to make Steve arch backwards as he comes, striping the sheets and comforter and his own hand and stomach.

Steve groans, body limp, and looks, dumb, at the mess of sheets. “Sorry,” he mumbles.

Bucky chuckles. He rolls Steve away from the worst of it, kisses him long and wet and lazier than before. Against Steve’s hip, he’s hard through his boxers, now, and Steve arches his own hips and makes Bucky hiss. “Want me to…”

It earns Steve a huff and a smile, but Bucky shakes his head, and buries his head in Steve’s neck, instead. “I want to know it was real,” he mumbles, face warm. “What it felt like.”

Steve looks up at the ceiling, the reflection of city lights, wiping his hand on the comforter and wincing at the feel of drying come on his skin. Curled against him, Bucky’s scraping tentative fingers through it, across his abdomen, and he looks almost curious, hand sliding lower. Steve bites the inside of his cheek against the sensitivity when Bucky touches his spent cock, but he doesn’t move -- not when Bucky slides ticklish fingers down the seam of his thigh; not when the tips slip lower, brushing the thin skin of his balls. His hand draws back up, through the mess of semen again and looks surprised, brings it to his mouth and gives a tentative lick.

Steve closes his eyes and groans, fingers tightening in the comforter. Bucky’s rocking against him, now, the front of his boxers dampening with pre-come, and Steve makes one more move to offer, but Bucky’s pushing, first, rolling Steve back onto his side and sucking kisses onto the back of his neck, lining his cock up against the crease of Steve’s ass and grinding, teeth scraping the skin of his shoulder and hand coming around to hold him in close.

“It’s all rattling around in my head,” Bucky pants, and Steve shivers because it’s right in his ear, because he can feel Bucky’s cock even through fabric, and because Bucky doesn’t talk about it -- didn’t then, after Zola, and it hasn’t changed, now, would rather push Steve down and solve problems with sex then admit to the monsters in the dark of his head. He’s talking now, though, words coming breathy between jerks of his hips, and Steve reaches back and holds him as his rhythm gets sloppy, as he stops concentrating on anything except what feels good, mouth open and breathing hot air across Steve’s skin.

“Doesn’t always feel--fuck.” The head of his cock catches against Steve’s hole and they both swear. “Remember that too, dunno if, could be a memory, could be something they stuck in there to fuck with my head. They looked like you, they always…” His breath hitches. “Looked like you, after a while it just--didn’t mean anything. All bleeds together sometimes.”

“Bucky…”

Bucky grabs his face, then, slides half on top of him so he can kiss him, hard and desperate and claiming, completely, a sloppy slide of lips and tongue as he shudders and comes in his shorts and on Steve’s stomach, hard like he’s been shot, like he’s forgotten how to do this, the way it can feel.

The possibility of the truth behind that has Steve gripping his arms and kissing him back, shifting the kiss into something gentle, tongue against Bucky’s and lips catching his own, tugging.

When they pull back, they’re both sticky and sweaty, the bed a wreck of sweat and fluids. Steve looks around and winces, even as Bucky burrows closer beside him.

“We’re gonna regret it tomorrow if we don’t get up,” Steve says. He doesn’t move.  
Bucky yawns, and shrugs, half-hearted. “Just take your damn pants off, Rogers. Seen it already.” Steve flushes, but can’t fault the logic; he strips his already pulled-down underwear, tosses them  
off the bed and helps Bucky do the same. The comforter is a loss, but the sheets are clean enough, and by the time Steve’s pulled the covers around them both, Bucky’s smirking, watching with one sleepy eye open and staring.

“Mother hen, s’what you are. Nothing much changed there.”

“Oh?” Steve slides back down beside him, pulling him close. “Is that right?”

“Uh-huh.” He’s half-asleep, now, too far gone to be self-conscious, to argue against the presence of memory. “Remember that one night, got a--fire went out, fucking, freezing our balls off. Got you like a damn water bottle and I’m tryin’ to keep watch.”

“Mmm.” Steve tries to hide the smile, kisses the top of Bucky’s head. “You remember that?” Bucky shrugs. “Sometimes.”  
He doesn’t move, though, and his hand slides up Steve’s chest, fingers curling as he closes his eyes.

It isn’t perfect, Steve thinks, but it’s good enough for now.


	8. GOLD

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What,” he murmurs.
> 
> “Nothing, just--” Steve feels like his insides have turned to liquid, doesn’t think he could get up if he tried. “Your eyes are still the same.”
> 
> Bucky huffs. “Well, yeah.”
> 
> “Prettiest thing I’d ever seen. All that blue.” Steve lays back on the mattress, letting his own eyes drift towards the ceiling. “Still is.”

Steve breaks from moving boxes long enough for a shower.

The water pressure in the Tower is yet another thing about the future (or maybe, just about living in Stark Tower) that Steve is sure he’ll never get used to: he ducks his head underneath the stream and lets the sharp slide of water turn his shoulders and arms red and hot, washing away sweat and grime, the leftovers of another day of moving and unpacking possessions that have somehow expanded, become heavier with time and space. He’s not sure he can track where all of it came from; Bucky has no real things of his own, and he’s sure his apartment was largely pre-furnished.

He wonders if the familiarity helps. Wonders if anything clears the ghosts in Bucky’s head; if this is normal, now. He’d learn it, for Bucky. But that’s not a surprise.

Steve leans into the spray and he thinks of their apartment in Brooklyn, the bathroom there, barely big enough for one of them. Remembers cramming them both in there, some mornings, all gangly limbs and sleep-warm skin, Bucky shaving in the cracked-through mirror and Steve washing in their basin that rattled and never had water better than lukewarm. Remembers Bucky pulling the towel off his own shoulders and drying Steve’s hair as soon as he stepped onto the creaky wood floor, muttering something sour about the boiler and hazards and wrapping himself around Steve, all hot skin, until he could push him back into the bed.

Steve shivers, coming out of the memory with a gasp that almost takes in water. Like going under, and he wonders if all of that was his -- if Bucky, somewhere, could see it too.

*

He comes out of the shower with a towel around his waist, to find Bucky sitting on the edge of what is by now, Steve imagines, probably their bed. If he shared Steve’s memory, he gives no indication; instead, he’s holding one of the photos Steve just took out of its box, a picture of the Commandos, in the summer of ‘44. One of the only photos he’d had, of Bucky, until not all that long ago. It’s hard to look at now, he thinks. Even here, his face is hard, haunted in ways Steve hadn’t seen, then, didn’t bother to pay attention.

He’s sure as hell watching, now.

“Hey, Buck.” Steve tightens the towel around his waist. “Thought you’d still be downstairs with Nat and Clint. Everything okay?”

“Hammer’s Life Foundation is being investigated for fraud. SHIELD’s denying any involvement, the records were ‘destroyed’ just like the others.” Bucky rolls his eyes, but his shoulder, the flesh and bone one, is knotted tight. “They thought if I could remember names or--dates, anything then I might be able to, but--fuck, Steve. I can’t shake it loose. It’s just not there.” He rubs at his forehead.

“Bucky…”

Bucky shakes his head. “It’s not--that wasn’t the point.” He raises the photo he’s holding, turns it to Steve with the frame extended. “Guess they’re all dead by now.”

Lost and trying not to show it, Steve tightens the towel at his waist, sits down beside Bucky on the bed. “Yeah. Dugan was the last, you believe that? Three years ago. 105.” Steve smiles, a little sadly, remembering Dugan’s family, his son going as bald as he did; his redheaded granddaughter with a career in software development and his penchant for dark ales and amiable swearing.

Bucky snorts, still staring down at the photo with an odd kind of reverential confusion. “Just missed him,” he says. The corner of his mouth is turned up, but he looks nervous, tense the way he used to get, like when Steve got sick and the rent had to stretch; like when the Commandos goaded each other into something reckless, like they all really believed that Steve could make them bulletproof. Nervous: jittering, uncomfortable, and decidedly human.

“You know I’m never gonna be who I was,” he says, words rough like they cut at his throat as he says them. Steve feels a pain in his temple and he sees Bucky the way that Bucky sees himself: jagged cut-outs of black and white, painful to look at and impossible to see around. Points of a star like knives, and Steve crosses the space between them and kneels at Bucky’s feet, hands on Bucky’s thighs firm enough to ground them. “That guy didn’t do the things I did,” Bucky tells him. “He wasn’t me.”

“But you’re still him.” Steve holds his breath at the way Bucky tenses -- tenses, but doesn’t deny it, and he puts his right hand over Steve’s, squeezing. Steve doesn’t miss the way he keeps his left arm tense at his side; the pale glow of moonlight hits it and reflects Bucky’s eyes, wide and wet and something ethereal. Like he never came home; like Steve’s dreamt this whole thing. “Bucky...I don’t love you less, this way.” He reaches out and touches the back of Bucky’s left hand, waiting for him to flinch, to pull it away. He doesn’t, seemingly paralyzed in shock by the movement. “You were dead, and you came home anyway.”

Bucky laughs, dry and a little cracked. “Hell of a way to do it.” He lets Steve shift and take both of Bucky’s hands in his, climbing up the bed and pushing Bucky onto his back. He looks up at Steve, and his expression is afraid in a way that Steve remembers without having to be taken there: he tastes cigarettes and cotton candy and swears he can still feel it, the sea-salt air and his entire world turning upside-down and righting itself, the way it should’ve been all along. His eyes are wide and earnest and he looks as off-center and unsure as Steve has ever seen him.

“You know I’m not ever gonna be the same as you remember.”

Steve leans down and kisses him, brushing their lip together before pulling away too soon. They haven’t done this in weeks, Steve realizes at once, and his whole body buzzes, a tremor across his skin that seems to start where they’re touching.

“Don’t know if you noticed, I’m a little different then when you left me last time too.”

Bucky laughs, but then Steve’s mouth is on his again, other hand coming back to cradle his head. The reaction seems to leave Bucky half-shocked and Steve pulls back, nipping at his lower lip. “C’mon, Buck. Teamwork.”

“Fuck.” Bucky digs his right hand into Steve’s hair. “Oh. Fuck. Steve.”

“I think I’m supposed to say something about language.” Steve sucks on his lower lip, pulls; wrings a low whimper out of Bucky. “But god, keep doing that.” Steve gets a hand between them to push at the waistband of Bucky’s boxers, and there’s a loud crack that makes them both jump, until Steve looks up: Bucky’s grabbed the bed frame with his left hand, wood shattered, come away into splinters underneath his palm.

They look back at each other, vaguely sheepish. “At least we don’t have to worry about the neighbors,” Steve says, quiet anyway. “You remember that?”

Bucky leans back on the mattress, looking over at the shards of wood in his left hand with a drunk kind of smirk. “Remember gettin’ that record player, just so that old coot would stop stickin’ his nose in our business. Flanders? Finster?”

“Foster.” And Steve remembers it, too: dented and second-hand, probably dug up from Bucky’s parents’ basement, but it played just fine and every so often Bucky would bring records home, Bing Crosby or Fats Waller, used to span his hand around Steve’s sharp hipbones and they’d shuffle to a semblance of rhythm, on pretense, more wrapped in each other than the music around them. Underneath him, Steve feels Bucky exhale on a sigh, eyes closed, and he knows he’s seeing it too, memory radiating heat as it spreads. “You remember that,” Steve murmurs.

“Yeah.” It’s almost a sigh. “Remember what happened next, too.”

And then Steve’s on his back in a single, graceful motion, Bucky straddling his hips. The movement loosens the towel Steve’s still wearing and Bucky glances down, and grins, sliding himself along the length of Steve’s body, pulling them both towards the edge of the bed.

Steve remembers this, too -- his whole body does, apparently, from his reaction, the way his skin flushes and his blood immediately travels south. He's embarrassed, on instinct: by accident or design, it's been weeks since they've been like this, and his body lights up when Bucky touches him, the way it always has. “Bucky,” he says anyway, proud of how he sounds almost even- handed. “You don’t have to--”

“--shut up and stop trying to talk your way out of a suck job, Rogers.” Bucky’s kneeling on the floor, now, and he gets his hands under Steve’s knees to pull him forward, until his ass is at the edge of the bed, erection tenting his loosened towel. Bucky’s hands run up his legs, pushing the terrycloth higher, thumbing the delicate skin on the inside of his thighs.

“Bucky…”

“Shut up.” Bucky reaches for the towel and pulls it apart, revealing Steve’s cock, thick and heavy and red against his abdomen. Steve’s fingers twitch with the urge to touch it, but Bucky glares and bats at his hand pre-emptively before framing it with his own palms, scraping fingernails up and down Steve’s groin, so close to where he wants him but god, not enough. “I’m gettin’ there. Always this fucking needy, too. Remember that.” Bucky shifts, though, and does as commanded, licking his right palm and wrapping it around Steve, giving his cock a few slow pulls, thumb teasing foreskin. “Christ, Steve, you’re beautiful. Always were.”

Steve snorts, at that.

“Don’t do that, I’m serious.” Bucky leans down and dips his tongue against the crown of Steve’s dick, and his hips jerk without permission -- fortunately, Bucky seems to see it coming, uses his other arm to brace Steve across the abdomen, keeping him still. “Fucking gorgeous. Everyone else was just too dumb to see it.” And then he’s dipping his head down, taking Steve so far down his throat Steve is sure he’ll gag. Farther than Bucky’s ever been able to go, even before the serum, but this Bucky just takes it, working his throat, swallowing around his cock as he pulls up, uses  
his fist to vary the motion. It’s unnerving, if Steve thinks about it, so he doesn’t, focusing on keeping his breathing even and watching the moonlight above them cut through by the skyline. He feels Bucky’s free hand fumbling for him, and Steve reaches out and takes it -- his left hand, the metal one, wrapping in his own and squeezing. Steve hisses when Bucky pulls off, abruptly, tries not to whine outright when he applies his mouth lower, sliding down the base of his cock, mouthing the thin skin of his sac, gentle with just the barest threat of teeth making Steve shudder, sweating and close.

It’s only once he begins to shiver, close enough to the edge that he can taste it, metallic, in the back of his throat, that he realizes it’s not just his own thoughts in his head. Instead, he’s seeing  
himself -- his old self, small and delicate and big, blue-eyed, hands clenched in thin sheets until his knuckles have gone white. His legs are hitched over a pair of broad shoulders and Steve knows this one, remembers it, too: but not the way Bucky does, couldn’t even begin to. Steve is luminous, in this version, all yellow-golds and aqua blues, pale skin that leaves Bucky breathless to touch, that makes him think he can take the punishment for his sins, if he can just have this a little bit longer. Bucky’s mouth is around his cock in his memory, and his lips wrap back around the head, here and now, and Steve arches and pulls the sheets and comes hard in Bucky’s mouth. Somewhere in the static, he feels Bucky pull off, and he means to apologize, should have given warning, but Bucky’s swallowing, and climbing up to kiss him, and Steve can taste himself in Bucky’s mouth and forgets what he was supposed to apologize for. Surely it couldn’t have been for anything like this. When Bucky pulls away, just enough to see Steve’s face, Steve reaches out a clumsy hand to cup the side of his face, thumb running along his cheekbone, the curve of his eye. His hair clings to his face, brown locks on pale skin, but Steve can’t stop staring at him, eyes locked on his until Bucky finally looks away, ducking with an awkward smile.

“What,” he murmurs.

“Nothing, just--” Steve feels like his insides have turned to liquid, doesn’t think he could get up if he tried. “Your eyes are still the same.”

Bucky huffs. “Well, yeah.”

“Prettiest thing I’d ever seen. All that blue.” Steve lays back on the mattress, letting his own eyes drift towards the ceiling. “Still is.”

“Steve…” Bucky buries his face in Steve’s neck, and his cock is still hard through his boxers, against Steve’s thigh. It’s clumsy, but Steve manages to get a hand between them, sliding into the waistband of Bucky’s pants and wrapping shaky fingers around his dick. He’s boneless, head still swimming from his own orgasm, but that’s okay, too -- he gets his hand around Bucky and gives him something like pressure, and Bucky pushes into it, groaning, rutting into Steve’s palm and hip and mouthing on his shoulder, his neck, leaving bruises and bite marks that won’t last the night. He’s strung up on a high-wire and it doesn’t take long: he’s coming faster than Steve, semen spilling sticky-hot over Steve’s fingers and seeping into the fabric of his own boxer shorts.

Steve slides his hand out and lets Bucky pull his underwear the rest of the way off, tossing it off the bed in an inelegant motion. It isn’t helped by Steve’s own curiosity, the way he brings his hand up to his mouth and licks the semen off of his palm, away from between his fingers. He hears a sharp inhale, and then Bucky is all but collapsing on him, claiming his mouth.

They kiss for a long time, half-asleep and hazy, still lying on mussed bedclothes. At some point, Steve starts to drift off; he feels Bucky move them both, getting the comforter around them; a pillow slides under his head, Bucky’s arm, his left one, underneath that. His flesh and blood palm spans out across Steve’s stomach, protective, and Steve thinks this isn’t all that different after all -- he remembers this, too, a hundred nights just like it, Bucky keeping watch for both of them, wrapped around Steve like he could keep the world at bay.

He couldn’t, of course; no one could. But with Bucky, Steve believes it. Steve falls asleep thinking that might be the part that matters.  
*

There’s gold, half-morning light coming in through cracked curtains when Steve wakes up. The blankets are wrapped tight around his shoulders, staving off the morning cold -- but he’s alone, and he jerks upright, eyes scanning the room, until he sees Bucky sitting at the window, and relaxes.

“Bucky? What are you--”

Bucky hushes him with a quiet noise, and Steve looks around as his eyes adjust to the dim light. There’s a set of model paints on the bench next to where Bucky is sitting, and he has what looks to be acetone and a couple of paintbrushes lying out on a towel. Steve opens his mouth to say something else, but Bucky shakes his head. “Hang on.”

Steve bites his cheek and says nothing.

A moment later, Bucky apparently declares whatever he’s been doing, finished. He sets down the paintbrush he was apparently holding and turns back to Steve, still holding himself at an awkward angle, left arm facing toward the window. “Sorry,” he says quietly. “Didn’t mean to wake you up. Still figuring out the whole 'internal clock' thing."

“What were you doing?” Steve nods toward the pile of painting supplies at his feet. “Show you in a second. Was just...thinking.”  
“You get those out of my kit?”

Bucky manages to look mildly sheepish.

“Okay, Cezanne.” Steve makes a twirling gesture with his hand. “You gonna show me this masterpiece?”

Bucky twists, just enough, letting his arm catch in the sunlight. And Steve remembers what it’s like to stop breathing.  
The star on Bucky’s arm is the same size, and shape, clearly used as the stencil for the change Bucky’s made: replacing the bright red, now, is a bold, clear blue. The color of the sky; the color of Bucky’s eyes. The first color Steve saw, breaking in a world of black and white.

“Bucky…”

“What do you think?” Bucky looks down at his own shoulder, then back up; visibly unsure, and Steve doesn’t have to think this time before he’s reaching out his hand, urging Bucky back onto the bed, even as the golds and coppers of sunrise bleed through the crack in the windows, slowly

shattering the dark of their little cocoon. Bucky crawls up the bed as instructed and into Steve’s arms, and Steve’s mindful of the insignia, the potentially still-damp paint, when he traces two fingers just up to the edging, fixes his eyes on the blue, and thinks about seeing it for the very first time.

And Steve leans in and kisses Bucky’s temple, right near his eyes, right above his stitched- together mind, and he doesn’t have to think before he answers, it’s beautiful, because of course it always was.


End file.
